LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Shel£,...lS... 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE MAKING OF A MAI. 



THE 

MAKIIG OF A MAI 



Rev. J. W." LEE, D. D. 



ZVd7f)(' 



NEW YORK 
CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY 

104 & 106 Fourth Avenue 






COPTKISHT, 1892, BY 

CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY. 
All rights reserved. 



THE MBK8H0N COMPANY PRB88, 
RAHWAT, N. J. 



CONTENTS. 



PAaK 

Introduction, . 3 

I. BREAD. 
The Provision for the Physical Nature op 

Man, 39 

II. POWER. 

The Provision for the Social Nature of 

Man, 83 

III. TRUTH. 

The Provision for the Intellectual Nature 

OF Man, 187 

IV. RIGHTEOUSNESS. 
The Provision for the Moral Nature of 

Man, 203 

V. BEAUTY. 
The Provision for the Esthetic Nature of 

Man, 253 

VI. LOVE. 
The Provision for the Spiritual Nature of 

Man, 293 

Vn. IMMORTALITY. 
The Permanence of the Completed Life of 

Man, 335 

Y 



INTRODUCTION. 



*' My God, 1 heard this day 
That none doth build a stately habitation 
But he that means to dwell therein. 
What house more stately hath there been, 
Or can be, than is Man ? to whose creation 
All things are in decay. 

' Man is all symmetry 
Full of proportions, one limb to another, 
And all to all the world besides ; 
Each part may call the farthest brother, 
For head with foot hath private amity. 
And both with moons and tides. 

"For us the winds do blow, 
The earth doth rest, heaven move, and foun- 
tains flow : 
Nothing- w^e see but means our good 
As our delight or as our treasure. 
The whole is either our cupboard of food. 
Or cabinet of pleasure. 

' Since then, my God, thou hast 
So brave a palace built. Oh, dwell in it, 
That it may dwell with thee at last ! 
Till then afford us so much wit 
That as the world serves us, we may serve thee 
And both thy servants be.'^ 



NATURE AND MAN. 



The meaning of creation is not under- 
stood till dust stands erect in a living man. 
That a great purpose was present from tlie 
beginning, directing and controlling, there 
can be no doubt. It presided over the 
first nebulous mist that floated out to take 
form in the foundations of the earth. It 
measured and weighed the matter and 
force necessary to form the globe. It de- 
termined the elements required to do the 
work lying through the years before it. It 
assigned to them their laws, specific gravi- 
ties and affinities, and appointed, before- 
hand, the combinations and collocations 
they were capable of making. 

But not till the atoms throbbed in a 



INTRODUCTION. 



human brain and beat in a human heart, 
did the purpose, which had through the 
ages run, stand out, defined and justified. 
Then it was that the intention underneath 
the drift of the ages spelled itself out in 
the unity of thought, the freedom of choice, 
and the capacity for love, potential in the 
intellect, will, and heart of the first man. 
He was the realization of an ideal, which 
gave meaning to the long periods of prep- 
aration. As the final expression of the 
creative process, he was at once the in- 
terpreter and the interpretation of all that 
had gone before. 



Writers of a certain school have sought 
to minif}^ man's place in nature. They say, 
as Dr. Joseph Leconte well declares, that 
he is very closely connected with, and forms 
a most insignificant part of, nature — that he 



INTRODUCTION. 



has no kingdom of liis own, but belongs to 
tlie animal kingdom ; tliat in tlie animal king- 
dom he has no department of his own, but 
belongs to the department of the vertebrates 
— along with birds, reptiles, and fishes ; 
that in the department of the vertebrates 
he has no privileged class of his own, but 
belongs to the class of the mammals, along 
with four-footed beasts ; that in the class 
of mammals he has no titled order of his 
own, but belongs to the order of primates, 
along with monkeys and baboons. His 
conscience is but the resultant of fear and 
instinct, slowly deposited through the years 
of his evolution. Its imperiousness is self- 
constituted. Its scepter it has usurped, 
and, from the exhalations of its own rising 
cowardice, it has woven the purple robes 
which constitute the badge of its authority. 
His morality consists of rules imposed by 
his own prudence, and which have no sane, 
tions beyond the opinions of his class or tribe. 



INTRODUCTION. 



His religion is determined by the physical 
conditions which surround his life — ^his 
geographical situation, the nature and con- 
figuration of his soil, his climate, and his 
food. Thus man is simply a natural prod- 
uct, while the civilization which he has 
produced is as much determined by the 
physical conditions surrounding his life, as 
the leaves and dates of the palm are deter- 
mined by the physical conditions surround- 
ing that tropical tree. The hopes and the 
trials, the courage and the sacrifice of the 
best men, as well as the ambitions and mo- 
tives of the worst, are put on a level mth 
the damps and winds. The one class is en- 
titled to no more credit for what is noble 
and heroic, than is rain for nourishing the 
crops ; while the other deserves no more 
rebuke for what is base and ignoble, than 
the lightning for striking the Church and 
killing the people. The love which ex- 
presses itself in monuments to commem- 



INTRODUCTION. 



orate the deeds of the good and the great, 
and the condemnation which lifts itself into 
jails to confine the criminal and the outlaw, 
have, in the last analysis, the same meaning. 
There is no sacred significance or obliga- 
tions rooted in divine sanctions, in either 
the monuments or the jails. Both are but 
fickle phases of the passing spirit. 

The convictions of Moses, reproducing 
themselves in the government, laws, litera- 
ture, morality, and religion of a great peo- 
ple, conserving them through the ages as 
examples of order and health, have no more 
meaning than the sap which rises in some 
monarch of the forest, to express itself in 
leaves and fruit. The conceptions of duty, 
which nerved the heart and inspired the 
courage of the Apostle Paul, leading him 
to plant churches in Asia Minor, to become 
the seeds of modern civilization, were as 
completely natural as the rising of the 
waters of some mountain spring, to flow 



INTRODUCTION. 



over silver sands to the sea. The music of 
Beethoven, the visions of Eaphael, were but 
as the vapor in the light of the morning 
sun, beautiful, perhaps, as the rainbow, but 
going out with the setting day. Whatever 
of emotion or conscience they embodied, 
signified no more than the colors of the 
peach bloom, or the notes of the falling 
cascade. However esteemed the valor 
that risked life to break the reign of 
oppression and murder, it was but a vary- 
ing form of the heartless ambition that 
sought in strength to make it prevail. 
The patriotism of Leonidas, giving up his 
life to save his country, and the insane act 
of Nero, swathing Christians in tar to light 
his feast, were forward and reverse move- 
ments of the same human spirit ; both 
natural, and both as unmoral as the elec- 
tricity that now strikes to destroy, and now 
burns the malaria to save. No difference 
is made between poison in the fangs of 



INTRODUCTION. 



snakes, and mercy in the hearts of 
men. 

Back of nature there is no purpose, and 
in its manifold combinations and adapta- 
tions there is no design. It is only a vast 
aggregate of unresting atoms, striking one 
upon another, and without intention and 
without purpose, forming pairs, clusters, 
and groups, and thus assuming the shapes 
we see. Why there happens to be order 
instead of chaos hangs on the uncertain 
turn of luck. 

II. 

If there is mind in the universe, and if 
there is purpose in the order and move- 
ments of the earth, then man is the culmi- 
nation of that purpose, and with reference 
to him was the order constituted and the 
movements determined. If there is naught 
but matter and force, and these exist with- 
out any directing or co-ordinating mind, 



1 INTBOD UCTION. 

then all things are without intention and 
without reason. There is nothing good or 
bad. Nothing is right or wrong. All 
things are reduced to a meaningless level 
of indifference. But matter and force bear 
witness to mind. Matter is here we know ; 
and matter has not only form, extension, 
impenetrability, for its qualities, but inde- 
structibility. Take the matter that enters 
into the composition of the eai'th. The 
amount of it is fixed and definite. It may 
be expressed in pounds weight. Since the 
beginning, not an atom has been added to 
it, or taken from it. Its presence here is to 
be accounted for. It either determined its 
own existence, and the exact amount, in 
pounds weight of that existence, or it was 
determined by some principle or power 
outside of itself, or within itself, called 
mind. If it determined itself to be, 
then it is intelligent, for self-determination 
and self-action are the essential character- 



INTRODUCTION. 11 

istics of mind. Then intelligence is re- 
tained by being transferred from something 
called mind to something called matter. 
But it has never been claimed that matter 
is intelligent. Then it is not self-active 
or self -determining, and vs^aits on mind for 
its existence and its movements. 

Matter as plainly bears testimony of the 
existence of mind, as to the existence of it- 
self. It is easier to believe that the earth 
has taken the globular form and the cir- 
cular motion by the determinations of 
mind, than to believe that through its ovs^n 
determinations it has assumed a circum- 
ference of twenty -five thousand miles, and 
the regular task of w^heeKng on its axis 
every twenty-four hours. . 

Not only is it impossible to account for 
the exact amount of matter making up the 
earth's size and weight, without assuming 
the power of a co-ordinating, determining 
mind ; but a still greater task is upon uSy 



12 INTRODUCTION. 

to account for tlie sixty odd original ele- 
ments, out of whicli all things in nature 
are formed without mind. These ele- 
ments differ in quantity, quality, specific 
gravity, and affinity. What determined 
their number, their tendencies, and affini- 
ties ? Why something more than sixty ; 
no more, no less ? Why so much of some, 
so little of others ? AVe must either con- 
clude that they determined themselves 
— that they held a convention before they 
existed, and resolved upon taking form 
and motion, or else we must believe that 
they were determined by some power, 
other than themselves — by mind. If by 
their own motion, oxygen, and iron, and 
gold are what they are ; then the elements 
have the power of self-action and self- 
determination, and are therefore intel- 
ligent. 

The collocations these elements form 
are more difficult still to be accounted for 



INTROD UGTION. 1 3 

without tlie agency of mind. Figures 
piled up to tlie sun are not able to express 
tlie possible combinations tliey are cajDable 
of assuming. The possible combinations 
of even twenty-four letters of tlie alphabet 
could not be expressed in literature, filling 
the world with books. Much greater 
must be the number of combinations of 
the original elements — the alphabet of 
creation. It is to be remembered, too, that 
they disagree on more of their sides than 
they agree. They are by no means 
equally congenial. Friendships and unions 
between them are formed in accordance 
with the most exact rule and affinity. 
Does it not seem, then, that combinations 
formed by chance would be mutually 
incompatible, neutralizing, and destruc- 
tive ? Would they not forever ferment 
in ungoverned chaos? Yet w^e see them 
dwelling together in the utmost unity, like 
seeking like, and in the bonds of law and 



14 INTRODUCTION'. 

harmony, uniting in compound, mineral, 
vegetable, animal, and the body of man 
himself. 

Were tnere as many of the letter a, as 
there are atoms of oxygen; and as many 
of the letter h, as there are atoms of hydro- 
gen ; and were the letters of the alphabet 
to be increased in proportion to their use, 
until they should equal the atoms of all 
the elements which enter into the compo- 
sition of the globe ; how long would it take 
these letters, stirred by some force like the 
Avinds, to assume the form of such a poem 
as Paradise Lost ? We cannot believe that 
all these letters, stirred by an unseen force 
through infinite ages, would ever form a 
sensible verse of poetry, or a rational verse 
of prose. It is as difficult to understand 
how the letters of the alphabet could ever 
get into the rhythm of Paradise Lost, with- 
out Milton's mind, as to understand how 
unconscious elements took the form of 



INTRODUGTIO]^. 15 

mountain, sea, grove, and globe; round, 
articulate, and law abiding, without a great 
co-ordinating mind. 

The physical forces and energies bear 
indubitable testimony to the existence of 
mind, not only outside of themselves, but 
in themselves and through themselves. 
We have the force of gravitation, the 
power which bodies have of attracting one 
another in proportion to their mass, and 
inversely as the squares of their distance ; 
in other words, that power which bodies 
have of setting up mutually aggregative 
motion, unless prevented by some other 
power of an opposite nature. A body sus- 
pended in the air is attracted toward the 
earth by the force of gravitation. A 
lump of sugar held over a cup of tea, 
attracts into itself the water of the tea 
cup. This is done by the force known as 
capillarity. A piece of iron left exposed 
attracts the particles of oxygen in the 



16 INTROBUCTIOK 

atmosphere. This is done by the force 
known as chemical affinity. Why do bod- 
ies attract one another in proportion to 
their mass and inversely as the squares of 
their distance ? Why does a lump of sugar, 
held close over a cup of water, attract the 
particles of water into itself ? Why does 
a piece of iron in the atmosphere attract to 
itself the oxygen ? We are told it is be- 
cause of gravitation, capillarity, and chemi- 
cal affinity. How happens it that these 
forces have methods of action known as 
gravitation, capillarity, and chemical affin- 
ity? They either determined themselves 
to have them and to act in accordance with 
them, or else some power other than them- 
selves determined these methods of action 
for them. 

The truth is, gravitation, capillarity, and 
chemical affinity are but terms we use to 
define the operations of mind. To name a 
force and to find the formula in accordance 



INTRODUCTION. \1 

with which it works, is not to determine 
the origin of its source. And because we 
have, by observation and experiment, found 
out the methods and the measures of the 
mind's working, is no good reason why we 
should read mind out of the process alto- 
gether. This is to mistake names for 
causes; and to suppose wh^n one learns 
how a force acts, that he has also learned 
what it is that acts. 

A contemporary of Shakspere might 
have observed the poet so closely in his 
home at Stratford-upon-Avon, as to be able 
to give to the world a detailed and exact 
account of his habits of thought and 
hours of study ; but this would not have 
kept the intelligent part of mankind from 
believing that a great mind had embodied 
itself in the immortal plays of Shak- 
spere. 

Heat, electricity, light, and magnetism 
must also be expressions of mind, for the 



1 8 INTROD UOTIOJSr. 

same reason that matter is an expression of 
mind. To believe them self-determined, is 
to believe them rational and intelligent. 
This has never been claimed, hence our 
only v^ay of accounting for their existence 
is to regard them as the determinations of 
mind. We see them, day by day, lending 
themselves to the uses and devices of man's 
thought, and expressions of thought they 
must be. 

III. 

This whole subject resolves itself into 
the question, Which is fundamental and 
prior, mind or matter? If mind is funda- 
mental and prior, then there is design, 
intention, and purpose in nature. If 
matter is first and fundamental, there 
is no such thing as design, intention, 
or purpose anywhere. If mind is first 
and fundamental, then man is the 
end and aim of creation, for in him the 



INTRODUCTION. 19 

mind that formed the earth finds a compan- 
ion and an interpreter. If matter is first 
and fundamental, then the earth is as much 
for crocodiles and wolves, as for men, and 
the life of a human being is no better than 
that of a lizard. If matter is fundamental, 
it were better to be a crocodile or an ele- 
phant than to be a man, for they have 
more of the fundamental stuff of the uni- 
verse in their bodies; and their brains 
generate none of that subtle something 
called mind, which perpetually asks ques- 
tions that have no answer, and cherishes 
beliefs that have no foundation. If matter 
is fundamental, then we should trust our 
faculties, in proportion as they are animal, 
and deny them in proportion as they are 
mental. Then the Neros and the Caligulas 
were more rational in their sins, than the 
Luthers and the Wesleys in their virtues. 
By following their lusts, the former found 
pleasure, of a low order of course, but in 



20 INTRODUCTION, 

the realm of tlie real ; tlie latter, following 
their convictions, found pleasure, of a 
higher order it may be, but it was in a 
false and unreal domain. It were better to 
be true to the facts on the plain of the ap- 
petites, than to be the silly victims of 
fraud on the plain of the conscience and 
the affections. But it is impossible that 
men have been true as they have been de- 
graded, and false as they have been pure. 
The design and purpose which has been 
apparent in nature, and which men have 
felt in conscience approving the right and 
condemning the wrong, must be there. To 
eliminate them, or to reason them away, is 
to bring mental confusion, and to take 
from the conviction and thought, which 
have made civilization, the principles on 
which they reposed, and by which they 
were inspired. 



INTRODUCTION. 21 

IV. 

Man has no deeper and surer impression 
than that the world belongs to him 
and was made for him. It is deepened 
year by year, too, as he sees the rela- 
tions he sustains to it increase. No 
more certainly are the walls, roof, and floor 
of a house related to the comfort and pro- 
tection of the family, than are the elements, 
forces, and seasons of nature related to the 
well-being and civilization of man. Moun- 
tain and sky, meadow and forest, the past 
and the present are permeated with the 
thought, or idea, of man, whether in the 
first stages of progress, keeping beasts at 
bay with sling or stone, or at a more ad- 
vanced period, tunneling the rivers and 
digging down the mountains. Young or 
old, child or man, nature stands ready to 
serve him. Water from her skies flows 
through his veins to and from his beating 



2 2 IN TROD UGTIOK 

heart. Trees and shrubs and herbs minis- 
ter to his pleasure and his ills. Kocks, and 
timber, and steel lend themselves to his 
service for house, hatchet, or chisel. When 
he ascends sufficiently in the grade of civ^ 
ilization to give expression to his concep- 
tions of beauty, he finds the colors in the 
ores under his feet to embody his visions. 
Would he illuminate his humble home at 
night, there is the pine with its light-giving 
tar. Does he live amid the plains, where 
the pine does not grow, there is the ox 
with his tallow ready to be made into can- 
dles. Does he live on the coast, away 
from the ox or the pine, there is the whale 
with his oil. Does he want a better light 
than pine, or tallow, or oil can give, there 
are the coal beds, with their sunshine laid 
up for his use for thousands of ages. Does 
he wdsh to turn night into day, and make 
his streets glow with the radiance of the 
stars, there is electricity to be drawn from 



INTRODUCTION. 23 

its wide, mysterious fields, to serve his 
growing desire. Would he cross the sea, 
the winds lie ready to fill his canvas and 
draw him from continent to continent. 
Are the winds too slow, there is the heat, 
stored in the mountains, ready to move his 
engine and drive his wheel. Does he wish 
to make himself ubiquitous, and send a 
message across the sea, before a ship could 
get out of port, there waits on him again 
the mysterious lightning. 

Nature teems with elements and forces 
to wait on man's every thought, to gratify 
his every desire, and to respond to his 
every aspiration. With all her wealth she 
surrounds him, and in ten thousand ways 
invites him to use it. The naturalist 
Guyot said the hand of man prefigures his 
destiny as an intelligent worker. So the 
form of all continents and islands, the out- 
lines of all seas and coasts, contain the 
idea of the human family. At a time. 



24 INTRODUCTION. 

geologically about tlie same, the surface 
conditions of tlie earth were prepared for 
the advent of man. The great Himalaya 
Mountain range was lifted up to prepare 
an embosoming plain to serve as a cradle 
for the human race. The long chain of 
mountains running through the whole 
length of the North and South American 
continents was raised to prepare the way 
for civilization on this side of the sea. 
When the ocean beds were dug out and 
the waters called off from a part of the 
earth's surface; when the mighty peaks 
and the majestic turrets of the mountain 
chains were lifted into the sky ; when the 
encompassing atmosphere was filled with 
all life-replenishing elements and wrapped 
about all oceans and shores ; when the 
poisonous forces destructive of man's life 
were locked up in soils and rocks; vAen 
the meadows were sown with grasses, and 
the hospitable arms of the trees were 



INTRODUCTION, 25 

loaded witli fruit, then, upon tlie earth, 
adorned and ready for his coining, man ap- 
peared. 



Considered as an embodiment of 
thought, man is the only creature who can 
interpret Nature. The ideas and principles 
that fill his great books were gathered 
from a study of her secrets and processes. 
The first books on geology, giving the his- 
tory of the earth, its upheavals, changes, 
and transformations, were written in the 
rocks, sands, coal-beds, and shells of the 
primal ages. The first books on chemistry 
were written in the shape, sizes, affinities, 
and specific gravities of the atoms which 
enter into the composition of all natural 
bodies. The first books on arithmetic, by 
the knowledge of which man learns to 
divide and conquer nature, were written in 
the qualitative relations and movements of 



INTRODUCTION. 



matter. The first books on astronomy- 
were written in the orbits and movements 
of the heavenly bodies. The first books on 
zoology were written in the structure and 
habits of the lower animals. The books 
that fill our libraries are but transcripts 
from the original volumes written in rocks, 
seas, flowers, and skies. Man is the only 
being who can read and transcribe these 
wonderful volumes. They lie unopened 
and unknown till his interest is provoked. 
Their language carries no meaning till 
he comes to find it and to ponder it. The 
herds that low amid the Alpine echoes 
see, as well as the distinguished Tyndall, 
the great glaciers, as they press with 
slow and measured pace down the moun- 
tain side ; but their meaning, and the law 
by which they move, is not known till the 
man of science comes. To him, they speak 
in awful and majestic terms. To the 
sheep in the meadow, the grass means 



INTUOD UGTION. 2 7 

nothing but food ; to man, however, every 
blade has a message, poetic and beautiful. 

Considered as a home, this world was 
made for man ; in a thousand senses, it was 
not made for any other creature. It is the 
home of the oyster, but its wants are met 
by a little basin in the sea. It is the home 
of the elephant, but a few acres of Asiatic 
jungle furnish the food and the conditions 
necessary to its life. It is the home of the 
bird, but give it a tree and a worm, and a 
small circle of sky to fly around, and it 
needs no more. But man needs it all. 
For his hunger, the foods and the fruits of 
its continents, oceans, and skies. For his 
thirst, the waters of its thousand rills. For 
his shelter and protection, all its woods. 
For his thought, all its order and law. 
For his ills, the tender ministry of all its 
minerals and plants. He is related to it 
all, and to be completely furnished must 
be able to use it all. 



INTRODUCTION. 



Considered as a place of discipline, tlie 
earth is for man, for he is the only creature 
helped and advanced by discipline. The 
beaver cuts his tree and builds his dam 
to-day just as the beaver did in the first 
year of his existence. He has had the dis- 
cipline that comes through work, but it has 
not improved him nor elevated him. In 
order that the bee may live, he must gather 
his honey and build his cell. This is dis- 
cipline. But he never improves. He 
never grows in culture or skill. The bee 
that built his cell in the trees of paradise, 
and gathered his honey from the flowers 
that grew in the garden of Eden, knew as 
well how to construct a cell according to 
mathematical principles, and to pack it mth 
honey, as the Italian bee of the nineteenth 
century, who stores his honey in a painted 
gum prepared for him by man. 

Monkeys in South America cross rivers 
by twisting their tails, thus making bridges 



IN TROD UCTION. 2 9 

of themselves. This is discipline and exer- 
cise of a complex and marvelous sort, but 
they devise no new ways of building 
bridges. They do not increase in knowl- 
edge or skill by their work. That he may 
gain the means of subsistence, man is under 
the necessity of work too. But his work 
is to him a means of growth and knowl- 
edge. His work has helped him forward, 
and secured to him culture and skill. 
Suggestions come to him, as he fells the 
forest, as he plows the field, as he plants 
the seed, and as he rows his dug-out. 
These suggestions he turns to account. He 
builds them into better axes for cutting the 
trees, into better plow-stocks for breaking 
the land, and into better boats for crossing 
the sea. 

By turning the suggestions he has re- 
ceived into better methods, into improved 
tools and machinery, he has come from the 
dug-out to the ocean steamer ; from the pack- 



30 INTRODUCTION, 

mule to tlie palace car; from the scythe- 
blade to the mower and reaper; from the 
stone and sling to the improved army gun ; 
from the spinning-wheel to the cotton-fac- 
tory ; and from the foaming steed of the 
flying messenger to the electric telegraph. 

Because of the growth and improvement 
he has received through work, the tom-tom 
has long given place to the piano, and 
the tent to the modern home. Through 
struggle with nature, he has been piqued 
into a determination to conquer her, to fer- 
ret out her secrets, and master her pro- 
cesses. 

The forces that oppose him he makes to 
serve him. The river current, which for- 
bids him to cross, he utilizes to ferry him 
over. He sets his sail in the wind blowing 
eastward and avails himself of its power to 
carry him westward. The waves that rise 
to engulf him he turns into steam to out- 
ride them. The winds draw his water, the 



IlfTnODUCTIOK 31 

river saws bis plank. The tail of the beaver 
is adjusted by nature to the mud he needs 
to cement his dam ; his tooth is already ad- 
justed to the hardness of the tree, so that 
he cuts it down by instinct and without 
thought. The eagle finds the air already 
under his wings when he would fly, and his 
talons already prepared to hold his food, or 
to grasp a limb in the forest. The fish 
finds itself in the beginning of its existence 
in an element ready to respond to its fins, 
and in the presence of food adapted to its 
life. The lower animals find themselves at 
the start in a world immediately adjusted to 
their needs, so that they have only to use 
their feet, their teeth, their horns, their claws, 
their wings, and their fins, to conquer their 
enemies and find their food. The animal is 
wholly governed by natural law, and hence 
has no history. He moves on nature's 
level, and is adjusted to her plains, her 
forests, her seas, and her skies, without his 



3 2 INTBOD UGTION. 

thought or his device. Man is not related 
in the same outward, immediate way to 
clothing, food, and fuel. His understand- 
ing, it is true, corresponds to the scheme of 
nature, but he must grow into this by 
study, by insight, by hints, by the use of 
faculties the lower animals do not pos- 
sess. As long as he remains on the plain 
of the tiger and panther, and emulates their 
stealthy step to creep upon his prey, or his 
human foe, like them, he has no history. 

The savage, perhaps, did master the mys- 
tery of the dug-out and the birch-bark 
canoe, but he had no place for his archives 
but a hole in the ground, and no experience 
but such as died with him. Man's history 
begins A^dth the attempt to conquer Nature. 
The contribution that Nature makes to 
human civilization is that she sets herself 
against his inward energies, as if to call 
them out. She puts limitations about him, 
that he may be prompted to rise above 



IN TROD UCTION. 3 3 

tliem. The fury and storm of the sea pro- 
vokes his ingenuity to express itself in the 
steamship. The peril to life and fortune 
contained in the lightning's flash, begets 
the steel rod that disarms it. The distance 
between the wheat that grows in one part 
of the globe and the need for bread in an- 
other, leads to the discovery of a method 
of transportation that obliterates it. Civil- 
ization is the expression that man has made 
of himself in his attempts, through thought 
and will, to effect the conquest of Nature. 
This witnesses to the peculiar and mag- 
nificent place which alone belongs to him 
in nature. 

It may be true that he has no kingdom 
of his own, no privileged class of his own, 
and no titled order of his ov/n ; but it can 
hardly be disputed that he has a history of 
his own. This history, written in the dim 
glories of vast empires, in the rush of splen- 
did cities, in the age-long conflict between 



34 INTRODUCTION. 

good and evil, in the undying creed of 
martyred faith, in the hope, fidelity, trial, 
agony, triumph, and self-sacrifice of the 
human race, bears witness to the fact, either 
that the earth was made for man, or else 
that he is the only creature upon it capable 
of subduing it, transforming it, recreating 
it, and appropriating it. If man is only a 
natural product, the powers have certainly 
been engaged in a marvelously intelligent 
and complicated sort of conspiracy to ad- 
vance his interests and to serve his domin- 
ion. 

Nothing but what we have been accus- 
tomed to regard as design, intention, pur- 
pose, is sufiicient to account for the fact^ 
that the scheme of nature so completely 
corresponds to the understanding of man 
as to make it possible for him to command 
and claim all her possessions for his own. 

Men will never accept such a hapj)y 
coincidence as the work of chance. They 



INTRODUCTION. 35 

will, by the very structure of their rainds, 
believe that the scheme and the under- 
standing, which, through the process of 
struggle and trial, grows into it, were in- 
tended, by the Great Author of both, the 
one for the other. 



BREAD. 



" The power that Greece had to throw out light is 
marvelous, even now that we have the example of 
France. Greece did not colonize without civilizing — 
an example that more than one modern nation might 
follow : to buy and sell is not all. 

' ' Tyre bought and sold : Berytus bought and sold : 
Sidon bought and sold : Sarepta bought and sold. 
Where are these cities V Athens taught ; and she is 
to this hour one of tlie capitals of human thought. 

"The grass is growing on the six steps of the tribune 
where spoke Demosthenes : the Ceramicus is a ravine, 
half-choked with the marble dust which was once 
the palace of Cecrops : the Odeon of Herod Atticus, 
at the foot of the Acropolis, is now but a ruin on 
which falls at certain hours the imperfect shadow of 
the Parthenon : the temple of Theseus belongs to the 
swallows : the goats browse on the Pnyx. Still the 
Greek spirit lives : still Greece is queen : still Greece 
is goddess. A counting house passes away : a school 
remains." 



CHAPTER I. 

THE PEOVISIO]^^ FOE THE PHYSICAL NATUEE 
OF MAIS'. 

Ii^ the form of bread, using the term in 
a wide generic sense, matter passes into 
the service of man on the plane of human 
life. By regular steps it is lifted and re- 
fined and adjusted to correspondence with 
human need and comfort. In its raw and 
individual state, it is controlled by physical 
force. From this crude condition it is 
carried by chemical force to the order of 
the mineral kingdom. From this plane, it 
passes up through the agency of vital force 
to the vegetable kingdom. Through the 
power of vital force of a higher kind, it is 
advanced to the animal kingdom. Here it 
is ready for man, and yields itself to the 



40 BREAD. 



uses of his life. From tlie time that vital 
force enters the realm of nature, a process 
of assimilation begins. The plant assimil- 
ates the mineral, the animal assimilates the 
plant, and man assimilates the animal. 
Through regular gradations, matter passes 
up from the bottom of nature into the 
service of man, who stands at the top. 
With each move upward it gets associated 
with force of a higher kind. With each 
advance its range gets wider and its move- 
ments freer. In the form of bread, it is 
sufficiently refined and sublimated to be 
appropriated and utilized for food, 
for shelter, for raiment, by the immortal 
spirit of man. The necessity for food, for 
clothing, for shelter, creates commerce, and 
commere accomplishes results far more 
important than the production and distri- 
bution of the temporal necessities of human 
life. It brings men together ; it establishes 
relations. It is the wonderful institution 



BBEAD. 41 



which, early in the history of the race, began 
as a loom to catch up the separate threads 
of individual life, to weave them into that 
marvelous fabric called humanity. Ends of 
an infinitely higher order are realized by the 
production and exchange of the elements 
of trade, than the satisfying of hunger with 
bread, or the furnishing man with clothing 
and shelter. The higher ends are the 
essential and ordained ends. That we 
may understand what an important part the 
necessity for food has played in the progress 
of man, it will be well to consider the sig- 
nificance of the relations it first helped to 
establish. 



All power whatever, that distinguishes 
man from the brute, that in any respect 
contributes to his commercial, mental, 
moral, or human value, is due to union, 
relation, action and interaction among in- 



42 BREAD. 

dividuals. In nature we may find illus- 
trations of this truth. Sound, electricity, 
heat, and light, are forms of force which owe 
their existence to action, relation, interaction 
among material particles. They would 
never arise in a universe of unrelated 
elements. Their difference is due, not to 
the vibration of different elements, but to 
different rates of vibration among the same 
elements. Consequent upon certain terms 
of formal and quiet social intercourse among 
the molecules, there is sound. When they 
intermingle more actively and intimately, 
there is electricity. With a slight change 
in the method, but no decrease in the 
velocity with which they move, there is heat. 
When they go at the top of their speed, 
waltzing and swinging corners at an un- 
thinkable rate, there is light. From vary- 
ing relations and actions among material 
particles, we get the music which charms 
us, the means of communication which 



BREAD. 43 



unite us, the power to do work 
wliicli serves us, and the beauty which 
refines us. The unceasing play of these 
simple unseen elements made the fame of 
Beethoven, who threw their vibrations in- 
to symphonies ; and of Morse, who utilized 
their speed to carry the news ; and of Watt, 
who hitched their radiations to the flying 
train; and of Daguerre, who put their 
undulations to painting pictures. All 
forms of physical force may be traced to 
the union, relation, and vibration of material 
particles. The distance from atoms to 
men is well-nigh infinite, but the points of 
resemblance between the genesis of physical 
force and the genesis of social force are 
sujfficiently striking to make it permissible 
to trace the analogy between them. By 
social force is understood all those forms 
of energy which men find themselves to 
possess by virtue of their relations to one 
another in organized social life. 



44 BREAD. 



Commerce insures tlie union, and brings 
about the relations that make this force 
possible. It furnishes the conditions with- 
out which it could not be. 

A seK-contained, self -included, insulated 
person does carry within the depths of 
his being the organs of the civilized man, 
but they are as completely out of sight and 
out of use as the harvests that sleep within 
the kernels of the mummy wheat. If it 
were possible for an individual to come to 
years of maturity, out of relations with his 
fellows, he would be more destitute than a 
brute. Such an one, growing uj) in the 
woods or on an island, with no associates 
but the squirrels and the birds, would not 
have the personal furnishments of the 
monkey or the fox. 

We can understand, too, by considering 
what man owes to his relations, how widely 
and completely he is separated from the 
lower animals. A thousand blackbirds, 



BREAD, 45 



living togetlier in relation, are not different 
from a thousand blackbirds living apart 
and out of relation. A squirrel gains no 
element of squirrelbood by companionship, 
and loses no element of it in isolation. 
He may be taken from his nest as soon as 
he is born and never be permitted to see 
another squirrel, but he will be just as 
much of a squirrel, and know as well how 
to get the meat out of a nut, as if free in 
the forests with others of his kind. A 
mocking bird comes to the power of song as 
well in a cage, separated from other birds, 
as when fed and trained in the orchard by 
the mother-bird. The chords in his throat 
were set to music, and without teacher or 
praise, at a certain period of his growth, 
his song will ring through the house. 

The difference between a man brought up 
in some lone woods, out of all relation with 
men, and one brought up in a civilized 
community, is infinite. The lower animals 



46 BREAD. 



get all tliey ever get by birth. No new 
gifts or powers come to tliem through com- 
panionship. They go unerringly to a 
certain destined end, whether they move 
in flocks or herds, or alone as individuals. 
Men, on the other hand, find themselves by 
coming together. Their organs sleep till 
waked by relation. By birth they can get 
nothing but the germs, the mere naked 
elements of what they are to become. 
Birth would be no blessing, but a deepen- 
ing curse, but for what comes to the child 
through relation. Birthright alone is not 
worth a mess of pottage. Men often con- 
gratulate themselves on what they are 
pleased to term their individual rights and 
personal freedom. While men do have 
individual rights and personal fi'eedom, 
it is always to be remembered that these 
belong to them because of the relations 
woven around them by the institutions 
of social life. The civilized man differs 



BBEAD. 47 



more from the savage, than the savage 
differs from the highest animal. Yet 
the lowest savage is infinitely removed 
from the highest animal, but solely in the 
possession of the germs of the attainments 
and the accomplishments which may be 
provoked and maintained by relation. 
Society alone furnishes the soil in which 
these germs can grow. The savage, alone in 
the woods, might secure for himself a cov- 
ering of skins, but the cloth in which the 
civilized man clothes himself is possible 
only in social relations. 

With the commencement of human 
relations, the outlines of an absolutely 
new world come into view. Dim and 
vague at the outset, as the relations are 
simple and low. But as these increase in 
number, range, and degree, not only the 
outlines, but the far-reaching surface, the 
mountains, the rivers, the products,^ the 
sky, and the climate of a new world stand 



48 BREAD. 



out clear, definite, and unmistakable. 
This new realm Ave name civilization. It 
is super-imposed upon the physical world, 
but is as distinct from it as thought from 
the molecules of the brain. Nature fur- 
nishes the basis, but social relations fur- 
nish the conditions of the human energy 
that has lifted itself into the mighty edi- 
fice we call civilization. 

All genera and species and families and 
individuals are so many forms in which 
the radiant energy of the sun has de- 
posited itself. Playing with its heat and 
its light upon soil, sea, and sky, the sun 
has built the myriad organic forms we see. 
So all objects, interests, and laws embraced 
vrithin the range of civilization are the 
forms in which social force, arising through 
relations, has deposited itself. Human 
language itself is an embodiment of social 
force. The grammars of different lan- 
guages actually advertise the social status 



BREAD. 4d 



and condition of the peoples who used 
them. In the Chinese language we have 
no distinction as to parts of speech, thus 
showing that the national consciousness 
was arrested at the stage of paternalism in 
government. The ancient Komans put 
enormous stress upon the will. They for- 
mulated the laws by which men are still 
regulated in civilized social life. A hint 
of this we get in the Latin language, by 
the small use made of the pronoun. Ideas, 
too, are expressions of translated social 
energy. Nothing seems to be more insu- 
lated than the human brain, by the aid of 
which the mind does its thinking. Out of 
sight and out of touch, within the dark 
depths of its own mysterious home, it 
would appear to be shut up to absolute 
solitude. Here, at least, we would expect 
to find individual, independent work. But 
not so. ISTo individual brain can think, 
only as it uses the brains of others in the 



50 BREAD. 

process. Homer's Iliad is a poetic formu- 
lation of wliat all Greece felt. Tlie ele- 
ments of myth, thought, passion, which it 
contains, were all in the contemporary 
Greek mind. In committing this poem to 
memory, the Greeks were but storing up 
their own thoughts. 

Hegel, in thinking out his remarkable 
system of philosophy, used the brains 
of all the men who had preceded him in 
the difficult work of solving the problems 
of existence. Darwin saw much in nature, 
because, through relation, he was able to 
look through the eyes of all naturalists. 

All values, whether in soil, waterfalls, 
precious stones, or money, are forms of 
social force. Land in a great city sells for 
two thousand dollars a front foot, because 
millions of people, dra^vn by the powers 
of commerce, have come into fellowship 
upon it. Eobinson Crusoe would have 
given all the money he had on the ship 



BREAD. 51 

for a loaf of bread. The heaps of gold 
and silver in Wall Street are so valuable, 
because seventy millions of people are 
circulating around them. 

Moral laws are social products. They 
are not empirical, but fundamental, eternal, 
and essential. They inhere in the consti- 
tution of man. But it is only through 
relation that man comes to the recognition 
of them, as binding for conduct. Light 
and heat have their laws, definite and un- 
failing, but if natural particles never 
vibrated at a rate sufficient to create these 
forces, the laws would not appear. They 
arise along with the forces, and the same 
conditions which give rise to the forces, 
give rise to the laws. So moral laws 
accompany a certain degree of attainment 
and culture, only possible through rela- 
tion. 

Religion itself, the highest and most 
sacred deposit of human life, is a product 



52 BREAD. 



of social force. Wlietlier we regard it as 
"modes of emotion," as Lecky; or tlie 
" recognition of all our duties as divine 
commands," as Kant ; or as " awe in the 
presence of tlie mystery of an inscrutable 
power in tlie universe," as Spencer ; or as 
" tlie infinite nature of duty," as Mill ; or 
as "the immediate feeling of the depend 
ence of man on God," as Schleiermacherj 
it never arises outside the range of rela- 
tion. Still, religion is something constitu 
tional, inalienable, divine; but man would 
never be thrilled by its hopes, or soothed 
by its peace, did he not stand in vital rela- 
tion to his fellows. The elements and raw 
material of religion are eternally present, 
but relation calls into exercise the suscepti- 
bilities and faculties which appropriate 
these elements and raw material, turning 
them into hymns, theologies, prayers, sacri- 
fices, liturgies, and ceremonies. 

Commerce, by bringing men together 



BREAD. 53 



under the necessities of finding food, cloth- 
ing, shelter, enables them to find their in- 
tellects and what they can know, their 
hearts and what they can love, and their 
wills and what they can do. 

Thus we trace the genesis of social force, 
Avith the expressions which it makes of 
itself, in property, literature, law, art, and 
religion, to mutual human relations, for 
the establishment of which, among men, 
commerce seems to have been ordained. 
If men could, without trading, have found 
the means of subsistence, as do the foxes 
and the lions ; then no relations in the high 
sense of the term would have been estab- 
lished among them ; and like the foxes and 
the lions, they would have remained on 
the earth without progress and without 
history. 

The sun must be making tremendous 
drafts upon some unseen sources of power, 
to be able to make, throughout the solar 



54 BREAD. 

realm, such ample expenditures of energy 
without banki'uptcy. 

The location of the vast depositories of 
power, upon which he draws so liberally, 
we are not to inquire here. We do know 
that the force which builds the forest, 
flushes the meadows with green, braids the 
vines into festoons, and peoples the plant- 
world, comes from the sun. Wherever the 
materials Avhich keep the sun's fires burn- 
ing come from, they must pass up to that 
center before they are available for service 
on this globe. The stamp and superscrip- 
tion of the sun must be upon them before 
they can take the form of grass, or leaf, or 
bird on the earth. In this sense stand 
human relations between the force con- 
tained in the individual, unrelated life, and 
the force which takes form in the objects 
of civilization. The crude and inarticulate 
force in the individuals of the tribe, or the 
nomads who only touch for war or passion. 



BREAD. 55 

must be refined through moral, political, 
and spiritual relations before it is ready to 
take the form of poem, anthem, temple, or 
Plato. 

11. 

We wish to determine the principle in 
accordance with which the production and 
distribution of food, shelter, and clothing 
are to be regulated. These forms of value 
are embodiments of social energy, genera- 
ted through relations formed above nature 
by intelligence and volition. In nature, 
then, we are not to find the law that is to 
regulate them. 

Bees build their cells, and birds their nests, 
and beavers their dams, not by intelligence 
and will, called into existence after birth 
through companionship, but by what is in- 
wrought into the very fibers of their being 
irrespective of companionship. Birds, bees, 
and beavers have been in the world 



56 BBEAD. 



thousands of years, yet the first bii'd, bee, 
or beaver ever created had as much sense 
as the last. A single bee has as much sense 
as all the bees in the world put together. 
Among all lower animals each individual 
inherits the sense of the species. Hence 
the law " of the struggle for existence," re- 
sulting in " the survival of the fittest," said 
to be a regulating principle in the plant 
and animal kingdoms, is not severe, re- 
garded with reference to the individuals 
which inhabit them. But to regard the 
operations of this la^v as beneficent upon 
the plane of human life, as does Mr. Spen- 
cer, is altogether to overlook the obliga- 
tions men are under to one another, be- 
cause of their mutual relations. The life of 
each man, it must be remembered, in so far 
as it is above that of the unrelated savage, 
is contained in the life of every other man. 
In so far as it is comfortable, intelligent, 
and free, it has been brought to him, and 



BREAD. 57 



made over to liim by his fellow-man. The 
law which is to determine the regulation of 
the elements of commerce, which are but 
expressions of the energy arising through 
mutual human relations, must be as ele- 
vated as the relations which commerce be- 
gets, and which in turn make commerce 
possible. 

We must not go down among the tigers 
and the hyenas, who owe nothing but bare 
birth to companionship, where the prin- 
ciple of " the survival of the fittest in the 
struggle for existence " does prevail, to get 
the law which is to regulate the production 
and distribution of products possible only 
through companionship. Each individual, 
be he weak or strong, has contributed 
something to the social body. The strength 
of the one may have contributed courage, 
the weakness of the other may have called 
forth pity ; but both pity and courage are 
virtues possible only in relation. A regu- 



58 BBEAD. 



lating principle that kills off tlie feeble 
ones, and drives tlie weak ones to the wall, 
may do for brutes, wlio owe nothing to re- 
lationships ; but not for men, who owe 
everything to them. The attempt to regu- 
late forms of value in accordance with the 
law of '^ the survival of the fittest in the 
struggle for existence " does not have suffi- 
cient regard for the contribution each indi- 
vidual has made, by the very fact of his 
existence, to make these values possible. 
The leading political economists of the 
times have come to see that the law of 
extreme individualism, of " every man for 
himself and the devil take the hindmost," 
must be substituted by some more benefi- 
cent principle — by some law that i^ays 
more respect to the methods by which 
values have been created. 

The province of commerce, as an institu- 
tion, is to bring men together, not merely 
that the boundaries of commerce may be 



BREAD. 59 



extended and its volume increased, but that 
men may learn the mutual obligations they 
are under to one another, that their sym- 
pathy for one another may be enlarged, 
and that respect for one another may be 
engendered. 

It is only in an atmosphere of mutual 
trust, sympathy, and respect that men can 
grow. 

The need for bread, for protection, for 
raiment, prompts men to the exchange of 
products, that each may share into the work 
of all. But in the process of exchanging 
products, relations are established, through 
the influence and power of which an order 
of man comes the mere material comforts 
of life cannot supply. The significance of 
commerce, then, is not understood, if it is 
considered simply with reference to its 
immediate ends. These ends are met when 
men are supplied with the material com- 
forts of life. Ends, however, are mediated 



60 BREAD. 



tlirougli it of a kind different in order and 
degree. These we consider the essential 
and ultimate ends of the relations which 
are established through the exchange of 
products. What, then, is the ultimate end 
and object of human relations ? It is man. 
Man come to himself, conscious of himself, 
in possession of himself. It is human life, 
enriched, perfected, completed. It is man, 
strong, free, holy. It is man, not lost in the 
social texture, nor swamped in the social 
organism ; but, finding his individuality 
and his peculiar, natural, simple self 
through them. The marvelous fabric the 
social loom was set to weaving is man. 
The highest end of social relations is a self- 
conscious, self-determining man, thinking 
the true, w^illing the right, loving the good. 
These relations constitute the organism out 
of which alone he can be born into sym- 
metrical, well rounded life. 

The lower animals come from natural 



BREAD. 61 



birtli into the world entire and complete. 
The young eaglet is correlated to the sky 
before he leaves the egg. But man moves 
on a plane lower than the brutes, if he is 
not caught at birth and carried by relation 
to his proper place. As man is the highest 
product of social relations, it follows that 
the highest product is the ultimate product. 

An apple tree may be used for fire wood,' 
or sawn into planks, but apples are the ulti- 
mate reasons for the existence of the apple 
tree. Toward an apple the germ started 
when it burst the sod and stood a little 
sprig above the ground. Beyond the 
apple, the tree goes no further. It throws 
its roots into the earth and its branches 
into the atmosphere, and perpetually acts 
and reacts upon its environment, but all 
for the purpose of turning soil, and sun- 
shine, and rain into apples. 

As we have seen, a part of the social 
energy arising through mutual human rela- 



62 BREAD. 

tions is to be converted into language, 
values, literature, morality, and religion, as 
a part of the capital invested in a sewing 
machine factory goes into tools. But man 
is greater than language, values, literature, 
morality, or religion ; as the sewing machine 
is greater than the tools by which it is 
made. Human relations create language, 
values, art, moi-ality, and i-eligion, that they 
may be used to advance and perfect the 
main work they were oi'dained to perform, 
" the making of a man." 

When the people of a nation come to re- 
gard the elements of wealth, literature, art, 
or even religion, as ends to be enjoyed 
rather than as means to make man, they 
have missed the purpose of creation, and 
wander amid the mazes of stuj^idity and 
blindness. 

As far as outward splendor and wealth 
were concerned, Babylon had no rival 
amono' the nations of ancient times. She 



BREAD. 63 

was a vast and ricli empire. She em- 
braced tlie most fertile portion of the 
globe. She had a capital that eclipsed all 
others in magnificence. Her hanging gar- 
dens were the wonder of the world ; but 
her people stood not upon their terraces to 
observe the stars, or to reach a higher civ- 
ilization through the realization of the 
nobler ends of their being. These were 
used as places of revelry and sensual en- 
joyment. Thus the only work of art that 
made them famous was used to make them 
stupid and depraved. Of her wealth she 
made an end. Putting no estimate upon 
men, through the relations of whom her 
wealth was created, she found at last that 
among all her people she had produced no 
man amply endowed enough to give per- 
manent mental setting to her civilization 
and her faith. Her heart throbs, whatever 
they were, got explained in no history, in- 
terpreted in no philosophy, and lived in no 



64 BREAD. 



life. For knowledge of her, we are de- 
pendent upon her ruins, her pottery, her 
broken columns. Into oblivion has fallen 
all that bejeweled and pampered life that 
reveled in her palaces and amid her far- 
famed hanging gardens. Among none of 
her luxurious inhabitants did she develop 
a man to commit the keeping of her 
secrets and the record of her progress. 
Over her history has settled the stillness 
of the desert and the gloom of eternal 
night. 

On the other hand, how secure is the 
Greece, that flowered in her great men ! It 
was in the two centuries between 500 and 
300 B. c, when she emphasized men more 
than the things they created, that she pro- 
duced the men who have been the teach- 
ers of the human race. She has been des- 
poiled of her art treasures, her temples 
have fallen, her Parthenon is in ruins ; but 
the two hundred years of her life, which 



BREAD. 65 

she deposited in her great men, are im- 
mortal. 

No tooth of time, no war's bloody hand, 
no devastation of the years, can take from 
her the glory which she lifted and locked 
in the genius of hergenerals, her statesmen, 
her orators, and her philosophers. Epami- 
nondas and Pericles still fight for her, and 
guard with sleepless vigilance her fair 
name. Plato and Aristotle still interpret 
her problems of destiny. Sophocles and 
Pindar still sing her glory. Herodotus and 
Thucydides still keep the record of her 
victories. Demosthenes and ^schines still 
give imperishable expression to her con- 
ceptions of form and symmetry. She de- 
posited her riches in the spirits of her 
great men, and they are forever secure. No 
thief can steal them, no rust can corrupt 
them. The unfolding centuries may look 
in upon them and enjoy them, but they 
cannot arrest them. The spirits of great 



BBEAD. 



men, like immortal ships, sail the ocean of 
time, bearing the treasures of the civiliza- 
tions which gave them birth. They out- 
i-ide the fury of all the storms, and will 
sail on, till 

The stars grow old, 
The sun grows cold, 
And the leaves of the Judgment book unfold. 

But when Greece came to think more of 
the results than of the living men, she lost 
not only the power to produce the men, 
but the capacity to appreciate the results 
which had been created by them. Think- 
ing more of the temple than the builder, 
she soon had no architect to conceive, 
and no son to understand the temple. 
Turning her national power into the 
spirits of her living men, she utilized the 
mountains and the mines in the service of 
beauty. But when life got cheaper than 
art, she no longer had power to create new 
art, or to protect from vandalism the old. 



BREAD. G7 



By removing tlie emphasis from men to 
things, she descended from the Crcesus to 
the pauper of civilization. 

As long as Israel expended her national 
energy in the production of men, she had 
Moses, greater than the Tabernacle; 
David, greater than his harp ; and Isaiah, 
greater than his song. But when the 
forms of her worship were emphasized 
beyond the spirits of her people she lost 
the devotion which created her church and 
the manhood that guided it. The men 
who formulated the laws that made Rome 
the mistress of the world, grew at a period 
when a Roman was the center of interest 
in the empire. But when her laws were 
stressed to the obliteration of her men, she 
had them still, without the ability to make 
more laws, or to execute the ones she had. 
Religion in India is emphasized more than 
character; hence her men are lost in a 
wanton and luxurious surrender to a mode- 



68 BREAD. 

less, transcendental, pure being, and slie is 
practically without a history. 

III. 

Tlie ultimate reasons, tlien, for the ex- 
istence of social relations, brought about 
among human beings by exchange of prod- 
ucts, is not the satisfaction of hunger, or 
the enrichment of individuals in material 
wealth, but the making of men. This be- 
ing so, we are able to determine the law 
by which the production and distribution 
of commercial products are to be regulated. 
It must be a law that does not put the 
emphasis on the products, but upon the 
men who are to be elevated through their 
exchange. It must not be a law leaning 
to extreme individualism on the one side, 
or to extreme socialism on the other. It 
must have proper respect to the individual, 
and to the social organism to which he is 
indebted for whatever of power he pos- 



BREAD. 69 

sesses. Tliat law lias already been formu- 
lated for us. It is this : " TIiou shalt love 
thy neighbor as thyself." This is the co- 
ordination of self-love and good-A^dll. As 
has been well said, this saves for us the 
strength of private enterprise, and individual 
initiative, the vigor of the self-regarding 
motives ; yet enthrones by their side as co- 
equal and co-regent powers, the principle of 
benevolence, the obligation to promote the 
common weal. Self-support, self-help, self- 
reliance, are still cardinal virtues, but phil- 
anthropy is given co-ordinate authority 
with them in the commercial world. This 
is the law most favorable to the growth of 
men. 

Under its benign reign, men can come 
to themselves. Through the operation of 
this law, there will be no curtailment of 
the volume or the extent of commerce ; 
but the emphasis will be kept in the right 
place, and men will not be lost in the 



70 BREAD. 



process of securing the elements of food 
and shelter. Commerce will be the means 
of mediating to men their higher nature. 
Surrounded by conditions engendered by 
the operation of a law like this, life will 
reach through relation higher and higher 
ranges of hope and insight. The elements 
of poems, symphonies, 2^^ilc)sophies, tem- 
ples, and pictures will flow in the blood. 

The fierce competition we see in the 
commercial world to-day is the attempt to 
re-enact, in business life, the principle of 
natural selection, or "the survival of the 
fittest in the struggle for existence." This 
is the law of the jungle, but not of the 
social realm. This is doubtless the law 
among trees, determining their number, 
variety, and structure ; for one tree gains 
nothing from association with other trees. 
This law doubtless operates in the sea, 
among the fish, and in the sky among the 
birds, for fish and birds are what they are 



BREAD. 71 



by birtli and not by association. Mr. 
Spencer regards the operation of this law 
as beneficent. It kills off the unsuccessful 
members of society, it drives the weak 
ones to the wall. Those who survive in the 
struggle are the fittest. The Greeks, who 
put Socrates to death, were, according to this 
so-called beneficent principle, the fittest to 
survive. This law is regarded as beneficent 
as it operates among men to control their 
products, upon the supposition that man is 
an animal and a part and parcel of nature, as 
are the bears and the wolves. The things 
which elevate men and civilize them, how- 
ever, do not come fi'om nature, but are 
engendered through companionship and 
association. Hence, from the sense of 
obligation men are under to one another 
for the best and highest things of life, the 
law is to be deduced which is to regulate 
their commerce and to determine the 
character of their actions. This law is, 



72 BREAD. 



" Thou shalt love tliy neighbor as thyself." 
Thus business looks to character. The 
discipline it insures is worth more than 
the money it brings. The highest product 
of trade is man himself. If in business 
such methods are practiced, if such aims 
are followed as destroy the man, however 
great the returns in money, it is a thou- 
sand fold worse than a failure. The 
man it was designed to make, it has 
destroyed. 

IV. 

The disposition to accumulate, which 
is right and pi'aiseworthy, should always 
be modified by right knowledge of the 
uses of property, and the methods by 
which it is amassed. ^Nothing is more 
pitiable than for a person to have more 
property than he has manhood. This 
indicates that the stress has been on the 
wrong side of the wealth. Such a man is 



BREAD. is 



under the sad necessity of taking Ms sig- 
nificance from the money lie has accumu- 
lated, rather than the noble elements of 
life he should have secured in the proc- 
ess of obtaining it. With such a man, 
the end of business has been lost. He has 
consumed the end in the means. Instead 
of turning the elements of trade into 
manhood, manhood has been lost amid 
the maze and chaos of things. The order 
of progress has been violated, and the 
man, instead of moving on through busi- 
ness cares to immortal character, turns 
back to the earth, and seeks to substitute 
the tendency to move from it, by the dis- 
position to settle permanently upon it. 
The desire to get rich has grown so ab- 
normal and perverted, that it seeks to 
satisfy itself by the abundance of mere 
things. There are a great number of 
mowers and reapers, engines and cotton- 
gins, hats and shoes, pins and buttons ; 



14: BREAD. 

but a man lias been lost in tbe making 
of tliem. This is more tlian all tbe 
mowers and reapers, cotton-gins and 
steam engines, pins and buttons ever 
made are worth. It is not mete that 
men should be sacrificed to the beauty 
and perfection of machinery, or to things 
machinery turns out. It is not necessary 
either. What we gain is not worth what we 
give. The machinery should be so manip- 
ulated as to get the things, and at the 
same time secure the perfection of men 
through the process. It is not necessary 
for the painter to lose himself in his art, 
and sacrifice his manhood to make his 
vision glow on the canvas. A proper 
regard for the methods and uses of art 
will result in leaving in the living spii^it 
a picture more perfect than any painted 
by the brush. John Bunyan did not lose 
his manhood in portraying the history 
of a human soul in its attempts to get 



BREAD. 15 



from eaTth to heaven. While conducting 
his pilgrim safely through the sorrow and 
temptations of life, to a home in a better 
world, he opened the pearly gates to his 
own soul. His work transfigured his 
life, and was the means of sanctifying it. 
All business and all work should lift up, 
and not hold down ; it should make free, 
and not enslave ; it should ennoble and not 
degrade. It is as honorable to make shoes 
or anchors as to paint pictures or write 
books. The shoemaker should learn the 
secret through his work of finding the 
sandals of manhood for his own feet. 
The blacksmith should learn, through the 
making of anchors for the great ships, to 
find the anchor that is to hold his own 
soul to the truth, amid the storms of life. 

V. 

If through trade only the material result 
is sought, the ends it were intended to sub- 



V6 BREAD. 

serve are missed. Its bulk may be large, 
the machinery througli wliicli it is carried 
on manifold and complicated, but with the 
emphasis on the money side of it, no man- 
hood will be reached through it. The man 
side of a button machine is infinitely more 
important than the button side. The but- 
tons which fall on one side may conform 
precisely to an approved and an exquisite 
pattern, but if the person who stands on 
the other side does not, through the pro- 
cess of making buttons, get a man out of 
himself, the whole thing is a disastrous 
failure. Human spirits are too valuable to 
be used up in making buttons. More re- 
spect is to be had to the human side of the 
loom than to the cloth side. The most 
beautiful pattei'n of silk ever woven loses 
its power to please the eye when it is re- 
membered that the soul of a woman has 
been drawn into its threads and colors. 
The sacrifice of individual life is impressive 



BREAD. 11 



and noble, if tlie object for whicli it is 
made is worthy. This kind of sacrifice is 
not the means of losing life, but of gaining 
it. But no material result to be used up 
in the passing season of fashion is worth 
such costly sacrifice. 

Through forces we name capillarity, co- 
hesion, and gravitation, matter accomplishes 
the purposes of thought. They are but 
manifestations of the power of mind work- 
ing through them, to build up the mineral, 
vegetable, and animal kingdoms. They look 
beyond themselves. They work for higher 
ends. Thus all the industries we see in 
nature look to lifting and refining matter, 
and force high enough to serve the uses of 
human life. So the industries established 
on the plane of human life are to elevate 
man another step in the scale of being. 
Through sowing and reaping, through 
grinding and sawing, through spinning 
and weaving, through buying and selling. 



IS BREAD. 



througli building and furnishing, lie is to 
be carried on in the march of progress. 

The history of the physical universe cul- 
minates in man, finds its interpreter and 
its interpretation in him. Never was the 
thought of him absent from her movements 
through Pliocene, Miocene, Eocene, Creta- 
ceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Carboniferous, De- 
vonian, Silurian, or Cambrian ages. In all 
her awful cosmic emotion to reach order 
and form, it ^vas the anticipation of man 
that moved her, for he it is at last that 
comes of it. So, through all the course of 
her tumultuous history, nature was preg- 
nant with man. The stars which sang to- 
gether in the early morning of the world, 
caught the inspiration which gave melody 
to their song from the thought of him. 

Commerce, if it is to be permanent and 
healthy and progressive, must fall into line 
with the purpose nature was put upon its 
perilous course to subserve. Her countless 



BREAD. 70 



forms of industry established by tlie law 
of supply and demand ; her ears, rushing 
hither and thither all round the world ; her 
great steamships on every sea; her great 
furnaces, whose chimneys lift themselves 
against the sky, must get their meaning 
and the reason for their existence from the 
fact that they are putting in their contri- 
bution to the making of a man. Her 
wheels are to fly, her spindles are to whirl, 
her paddles are to splash, and her hammers 
are to ring, making music amid it all, in 
anticipation of his increasing worth. Lis 
growing thought, his enlarging hope. Her 
countless wheels of industry will be throw- 
ing out axes, wagons, plow-stocks, hand- 
saws, and reapers as they fly ; but these will 
be only so many means used to discipline 
the precious life committed for a while to 
her training. What chemical affinity did 
in lifting the original elements to the 
mineral kingdom, and what the animal 



80 BREAD. 



did to lift the plant to the animal king- 
dom, so the trades and industries of com- 
merce are to do in lifting human life from 
its individual, unrelated state to its social 
and fraternal state. The elements of com- 
merce are to be the means to help human 
character out of human nature. Two kinds 
of raw material are to be refined. The iron 
in the mountain is to be turned into razor 
blades and caligraj)hs; the reeds in the 
swamps and the woods in the forests are to 
be turned into the notes of organ and piano ; 
and in the process of refining these, man is 
to be disciplined in the use of himself, in 
the possession of himself, and in the com- 
mand of himself. 



POWER. 



*' Excessive devotion to the material is the evil of 
our epoch ; hence a certain sluggishness. 

"The great problem is to restore to the human 
mind something of the ideal. Whence shall we draw 
the ideal ? Wherever it is to be found. The poets, 
the philosophers, the thinkers, are its urns. 

"The ideal is in ^sch 3^1 us, in Isaiah, in Juvenal, 
in Alighieri, in Shakspere. Throw ^scliylus, throw 
Isaiah, throw Juvenal, throw Dante, throw Shakspere 
into the deep soul of the human race. 

"Poui'Job, Solomon, Pindar, Ezekiel, Sophocles, 
Euripides, Herodotus, Theocritus, Plautus, Lucretius, 
Virgil, Terence, Horace, Catulus, Tacitus, Saint Paul, 
Saint Augustine, Tertullian, Petrarch, Pascal, Mil- 
ton, Descartes, Corneille, La Fontaine, Montesquieu, 
Diderot, Beaumarchais, Sedaine, Andr^ Chenier, 
Kant, Schiller— pour all these souls into man." 



CHAPTER 11. 

THE PEOVISION FOR THE SOCIAL NATURE OF 
MAN. 

Man lias a body and a spirit. By tlie 
one, lie is individual; by the other, he is 
social. As individual, he needs bread ; as 
social, he needs power. As body, he is born 
from the loins; as spirit, he is born from 
the social organism. In the process of find- 
ing food, clothing, shelter, to meet the needs 
of himself as individual, he discovers that 
illimitable social side of himself the ma- 
terial necessities of life do not supply. 
Here he finds power, a more subtle and uni- 
versal element, ready to serve his higher 
need. This is the provision for the social 
side of man's nature ; for, as individual, he 
does not need it, and could not appropriate 

83 



84 POWER. 



and use it if lie did. As an individual, lie 
can only avail himself of tlie use of power, 
througli the attempt of the social whole of 
which he forms a member. In the primi- 
tive, unrelated, unorganized state, man is 
satisfied if he can secure food to satisfy his 
hunger, and a cave to shelter him from the 
storm. He does not even utilize the winds 
to draw his boat, until, through inter- 
dependence and mutual relations, he has 
reached a high degree of social life. The 
servants of man, on his individual side, are 
the foods of the field, the waters of the 
spring, the woods of the forest, the fruits of 
the orchard, and the wool on the sheep's 
back. The servants of man, on his social 
side, are the driving power of the winds, 
the transporting power of heat, and the 
thought-def}dng power of the lightning. 
As individual, he is a citizen of the com- 
munity where he first sees the light. As 
social, he is a citizen of the world. Through 



POWER. 85 



his body, lie is naturally related to Ms an- 
cestors ; through his spirit, he is related to 
the human race. The rude elements of 
food, clothing, and shelter, he might secui'e 
as individual ; but power, which waits to 
serve his higher, nobler nature, he can only 
secure through society. As individual, he 
is narrow, meager, local. As social, he is 
broad, rich, universal. On his individual 
side, he is centripetal ; on his social side, cen- 
trifugal. Self -centered, self-contained, and 
self -included, on the one side ; while, upon 
the other, he is possessed of the conviction 
that private right must be subordinated to 
public good. Tethered to the earth on the 
one side, linked with the immensities on the 
other. On the one side, his outlook is hard 
and literal and low ; on the other, he seeks, 
through intellect, to transcend the infinite 
in time and space and truth. On the side 
of himself, as individual, he knows no right 
or wrong. On the side of himself, as social, 



POWER. 



lie recognizes the infinite in duty, and seeks 
harmony tlirougli tire infinite in love. 

II. 

Yet this limited and unlimited self ; tran- 
sitory, perishable, and finite on the one side ; 
everlasting, imperishable, and infinite on 
the other, are bound together in the same 
person. The fall of the one is accompanied 
by the descent of the other, and the rise 
of the one is accompanied by the ascent of 
the other. Their union involves perpetual 
conflict, and there waits on the turn of the 
battle, the depression of remorse, or the 
exultation of trium])h. 

On the individual side of himself, man 
would take up Avith the present, the imme- 
diate, Avith that which allures the sense, 
and, with unholy incense, regales the im- 
agination. On the social side of himself, 
he would despise the immediate, and give 
the casting vote in favor of the unbiased. 



POWER. 87 



immeasurable good. In sucli a being as 
man, conflict were inevitable. With a 
horizon measured by the edge of the plain 
where he stands on the one side, and a hori- 
zon melting into the infinite star depths on 
the other, it were but to be expected that a 
contest would arise between the larger 
and the lesser outlook. On the one side, 
he would possess the field, concentrate his 
attention upon its grasses and its fruits, 
and lose himself in its products. On the 
other, he would go forth to see where the 
stars are, to consider the sources of their 
light, and to travel with them along their 
silent paths. With a view measured by 
the hour that shuts him round on the one 
side, and with a view measured by the 
organic pulsations of the world on the 
other ; the question would be, whether to 
give himself to the immediate pleasures of 
the hour ; or to elongate the pendulum of 
his timepiece till it should embrace the 



88 POWEB. 



ages, and regulate his life by an eternal 
measure. With appetites on one side, 
clamoring for the things in sight, and with 
conscience on the other, calling for har- 
mony with things high and remote; the 
question would be, whether to give the 
consent of the will to the demand of the 
ap23etites, or to the appeal of the con- 
science. 

III. 

Knowing the side of himself of which a 
man takes counsel — the individual, or the 
social — you are prepared to fix his grade 
in the scale of being. The difference be- 
tween Benedict Arnold and George Wash- 
ington was just this : in the case of the one 
the indiviual side was dominant ; in the 
case of the other the social side held sway. 
This is the difference between the miser, 
despised of all, and the philanthropist, 
honored of all. This is the difference be- 



POWER. 89 



1 



tween the debauclie and the saint, between 
the man who lives for his God and his 
race, and the man who pours himself out 
on his lust and his passion. If the 
promptings of the individual side of man's 
nature are to be distrusted and watched, 
while liberal and unstinted recognition is 
to be given to the social side, it is well to 
inquire into the meaning and office of this 
larger fact of his life. 

Let it be granted that on the individual 
side of himself man has no kingdom of his 
own, no department of his own, no privi- 
leged class of his own, and no titled order 
of his own. Let this side of him be 
left to the naturalist, to be classed 
with the vertebrates, the mammals, or the 
primates. But what conclusion are we to 
reach concerning the social side of himself, 
that has found embodiment in that vast 
and complicated movement we call civiliza- 
tion? Through this age-long historic pro- 



90 POWER. 



cess man lias been seeking to realize tlie 
capacities of his larger nature. Like a 
magnificent temple, civilization lias been 
rising through the centuries. Its walls 
have silently come up from the earth, like 
Solomon's Temple, Avithout clink of trowel 
or sound of hammer. It is built of granite, 
cut from the Gethsemanes of history. 
Leonidas and his brave three hundred at 
the pass of Thermopylae carved some of 
the blocks of this great edifice, into whose 
walls men have gone do^vn as the living 
stones. The brave Britons; at the waters 
of Solway, lifted to place some of the 
richly foliaged pillars that stand upon its 
floors. William the Silent, while organiz- 
ing the forces and achieving the victories 
of the Netherlands, was at the same time 
turning some of its arches and resting in 
place some of its architraves. The 
Martyrs, who went to undying fame and 
honor through fires of Smithfield, furnish 



POWER. 91 



themes for tlie music which resounds 
through its corridors. It is the triumph 
of the social nature of man, and stands 
upon the soil which has been made by the 
crumbling dust of all generations of brave 
men. Its pinnacles and towers pierce the 
skies, and declare to the immeasurable 
heights, the force, the faith, the sentiment, 
and the love of man. It defies the ele- 
ments of disintegration and change, and 
around the tops of its lofty pillars there 
cluster the buds of eternal spring. The 
gigantic trunks, whose arched branches 
support the roof of this great structure, 
express themselves in never withering 
flowers, and, where the boughs interlace at 
the summit of the arches, there comes the 
light of heaven to color and illumine. 
Yet within its doors we are in no forest of 
stone, where thoughts of men have been 
chiseled into semblance with the trees. 
Its foundations are built of convictions, its 



92 POWER. 



pillars of hope, its vaulting of lofty pur- 
pose, and its windows of faith. Its 
cement is tlie blood of suffering, and its 
decoration the loves of heroes. It is the 
edifice man has built in which to house 
the social side of his nature. It contains 
and will conserve all contributions ever 
made to human weal. 

In walking the streets of Rome, one has 
a strange and melancholy sense of the tra- 
ditions and memories which cluster about 
every ruin and every spot. But around 
the myriad facts and forces of civilization 
there hang associations more pathetic still. 
Here we walk, not amid the ruins of the 
past, but amid the achievements, the vic- 
tories, and the glories of the past. Achieve- 
ments, victories, and glories not associated 
Avith bi'oken columns, defaced monuments 
and moldering ruins, but with the laws 
and institutions of living men. We have 
here, in ten thousand embodied forms, the 



POWER 93 



travails of the souls of our fathers. Their 
spirits live in the words we use, their con- 
sciences bind in the laws we observe, their 
visions bless in the pictures we see, and 
their devotion sanctifies in the religion we 
love. All the blood ever shed in sacrifice, 
all the eloquence that ever tlirilled senates 
and peoples in defense of the right, all the 
protests ever in silence felt or in public ut- 
tered against the wrong, are here held in 
everlasting form. 

Are we to regard civilization, the mani- 
fold and complicated sum in which man's 
social nature has expressed itself, as noth- 
ing more than a natural product ? Are we 
to account for this by the same physical 
principles in accordance with which the bee 
builds his cell, the monkey hangs his 
bridge, and the beaver erects his dam? 
Does this stately projection of man's social 
nature mean no more than some lofty Al- 
pine Matterhorn, pushed into the heavens 



94 POWER. 



by the unconscious fires in the earth's 
bosom ? Is this only like some mighty 
Giants' Causeway, lifted up by the same 
physical forces and by the same natural 
processes ? If this is so, why is it that when 
we turn away from civilization as a whole, 
to view it in some of its national forms, we 
see the spiritual ups and downs of history 
in such striking contrast with the uniform 
face which nature wears ? If the radiant 
civilization of Greece, that filled the earth 
with the eloquence of thought and the 
melody of song, with the Republic of Plato 
and the Ethics of Aristotle, that clothed 
itself in the Parthenon of Phidias and the 
Iliad of Homer, was as natural among the 
nations as the U2:)rising of Gibraltar among 
the mountains, why is it that Gibraltar still 
stands as the solemn sentinel of the Ocean 
and tbe Sea, while the civilization of 
Greece is but a memory of the past ? The 
same sky and earth, and Mar's Hill are 



POWER. 95 



there. Around her classic coast there still 
murmurs the same heaving sea. But while 
ships may still sail to Gibraltar, never more 
can they draw up to the Piraeus of worthy 
representatives of Plato and Aristotle. 
Not again do men, w^th noble brows, deep 
eyes, and never dying thought, look into 
the ^gean from that memorable meeting 
place of the world's ships. 

If the history of Israel, from the time of 
Abraham to the coming of John the Bap- 
tist, was but a natural product, as easy to 
be accounted for as the mountains round 
about Jerusalem ; why is it that the moun- 
tains still encompass the holy city ; while 
we find no more men like Moses, David, 
and Isaiah to lead, to rule, and to prophesy ? 
There are the same Judean hills and val- 
leys. There rapidly flows the same his- 
toric Jordan. There grow the same gra23es, 
the flgs, and olives. There are the same 
holy mountains. There are the same danger- 



96 POWER. 



ous rocks in tlie sea at Joppa. The physi- 
cal conditions that made the corn and the 
honey and the cattle are there ; and there 
still are found the corn, the honey, and the 
cattle. But no massive man like Moses 
ever more climbs Sinai to get law on tables 
of stone, or Pisgah, to see the promised 
land and die. No man after God's own 
heart, like David, any more minds sheep, 
watches the stars, and writes poetry there. 
Never more do we find there a man like 
Isaiah, struggling on his knees in prayer 
that he may rise up to give his people the 
oracles of God. A shallow, degenerate 
and fickle people dwell amid the groves 
and the ^dnes where once lived the great 
race which gave to men their ethics and 
the outlines of true religion. 

If the civilization of Eome, that reached 
such volume and force as to make her the 
mistress of the world, was as natural as 
the rising and falling of the tides, why is it 



POWER. 97 



that Rome is in ruins, while the tides con- 
tinue to rise and fall ? With no other aid 
than such as is afforded by natural law 
and physical force, we cannot solve this 
problem. Where monkeys grew once, 
monkeys grow to-day ; where lions roamed 
once, lions roam to-day ; where figs grew 
once, figs grow to-day. The same physical 
conditions, the same configuration of soil, 
the same degree of climate, produce uni- 
form natural results from age to age. 
These may be counted on with the cer- 
tainty of a coming eclipse, conditioned on 
varying conjunctions of the heavenly 
bodies. But we must pass from the level 
and range of soil, sky, climate, and physical 
conditions, to account for the fact that a 
country in one period of its history pro- 
duces a Pericles, and, in another, a 
muddy -headed numskull ; in one age an 
aristocracy of poets, artists, statesmen, 
philosophers, and orators ; and in another, 



POWER. 



a listless swarm of stupid and secular cum- 
berers of the ground. 

IV. 

The explanation of this question is to be 
found in the fact that man has a dual na- 
ture, a body and a spirit, by virtue of which 
he is individual and social. When the 
center of gravity is on the social side of 
human nature, the fortunes of man go up ; 
when the center of gravity is on the indi- 
vidual side, the fortunes of man go down. 
On the individual side, he is the subject of 
physical law. On the social side, of moral 
law. 

That man was intended to express the 
force of his life through the social side of 
himself and in accordance with moral law, 
instead of through the individual side of 
himself and in accordance with physical 
law, is plain, from the fact that it is only 
when he gives social expression to his life 



POWER. 99 



that he reaches any degree of commanding 
and permanent inflnence. 

The unrivaled place which the Greece 
of Pericles holds in history is due to the 
fact that he lived at a time when the 
emphasis was altogether on the social side 
of her people. The individual side was 
completely subordinated to the life of the 
whole. It is doubtless true that she 
pressed a right to rule too far, and stressed 
the citizen too much, and considered the 
claims of the individual too little. A 
proper balance is to be preserved between 
the individual and the social man. But it 
is true that in mers:ino; the life of the indi- 
vidual into that of the state, Greece did 
prepare a soil compact and rich enough to 
grow the most ample harvest of literature, 
art, poetry, philosophy, and men, the world 
ever saw. As soon as the emphasis passed 
over from the social to the individual side, 
the process of pulverization began, and the 



100 POWER. 



continuities of thonglit and as23iration 
were broken uj). ]S"ational unity was 
dissolved, and the conditions of great men 
and great results were no longer present. 

The difference between the Greece of 
300 B. c. and the Greece of to-day, is the 
difference between giving the national life 
a social and an individual expression. 
The Greece of 300 b. c. was a compact 
whole, made so by each man putting in 
his individual life as a contribution to the 
life of the state. The Greece of to-day is 
an aggregate of self-centered units, held 
together like so many potatoes in a basket, 
by outward force and barriers, rather than 
by loyalty, patriotism, fidelity, and the 
cling of man to man. In the Greece of 
300 B, c, each man, while giving his in- 
dividual life to his follows, gathered into 
his own being all the life they had to give. 
Hence in Socrates we had a reproduction 
of all Greece. In Homer, all her poetic 



POWER. 101 



passion, and expression. In the orations of 
Demosthenes, all tlie aspirations of her 
heart and all her love of liberty. In the 
Greece of to-day, we have not the same 
intimacy of companionship, or the same 
network of relationships. Each man, 
thinking more of himself as individual 
than of himself as social, finds it no longer 
possible to make levies on the lives of his 
fellows, to think his thought, conceive his 
temple, deliver his oration, or write his 
poem. So it follows, they no longer think 
great thoughts, conceive great temples, 
deliver great orations, or write great 
poems. Each man, in the high sense, 
being a separate sand, they have a social 
soil as barren as a desert. 

Rome won her victories, wrote her laws, 
and laid the foundations of her world-wide 
empire, when her people gave social rather 
than individual expression to the force 
of their lives. A typical illustration we 



102 POWER. 



have of tliis in the fidelity of Regulus. 
A prisoner at Carthage, he is permitted to 
go to Rome to induce his countrymen to 
make peace with the Carthaginians. He 
pledged his word to return if he failed. 
On reaching Home, however, instead of 
seeking to persuade his people to make 
peace, he appealed to them to continue 
the war. The social side of himself be- 
longed to Rome ; speaking through that, 
he called upon her to prosecute the war. 
The individual side of himself was per- 
sonal ; acting through that, he went back 
to Carthage in honor of his pledge, to be 
cruelly put to death by his captors. This 
single incident is sufficient to help us 
understand why, from her seven hills, 
Rome conquered and for a long time ruled 
the world. The individual was simk in 
the Roman. Not, as in the case of Greece, 
that his personal identity might be swal- 
lowed up in the mass, but that he might 



POWER. 103 



find a personal identity as great as the 
empire, of whose social life lie was the 
embodiment. Eegulus was an epitome of 
Rome. In him was all her indomitable 
will, her moral sturdiness, her iron pro- 
bity. In him she had a son, in the depth 
of whose spirit all the glory she had won 
in war, and all the control she had found 
in sacrifice, was safe. Regulus had the 
advantage of the Carthaginians, in that 
the larger, nobler side of himself was safe 
from their hate. The Roman, the social 
Regulus, was as eternal as the majesty, 
and fame, and mystery of the Roman 
empire. 

The doom of Rome, as a nation, was 
never sealed till the stress was removed 
from the social to the individual side of her 
people. She might have lived on among 
the nations, as fixed as her o^^ti eternal hills, 
if the temptations to self-indulgence and 
self-gratification had been i^esisted. Her 



104 POWEE. 



downfall was not due to physical causes^ 
but to her sins Observance of the moral 
laws, which made her great, would have 
kept her great. When she threw her 
larger, social self into the fires of her indi- 
vidual lust and passion, she burned the 
foundations of her dominion, and a mighty 
wreck of shapeless ruins was all that was 
left of the once proud mistress of the 
world 

V. 

What is the correlate to the social side 
of man's nature ? Where is the domain 
that matches it ? Where is the vast realm, 
large enough to furnish sufficient scope for 
all the possibilities which seem to lie folded 
Avithin it? A study of the eye reveals the 
fact that the light of the sun is necessary 
to furnish an element mde and ethereal 
enough for the exercise of its func- 
tions By a study of the ear, we learn 
that it is related to sound with all its pos- 



POWER. 105 



sibilities of harmony. Tlie fin of the fish 
is related to the waters of the sea. The 
bird's wing is a prophecy of the sky. The 
migrating instinct of the wdld goose is re- 
lated to the South, with its soft skies and 
balmy air. 

In the calculations of Adams, in Eng- 
land, and of Leverrier, in France, the per- 
turbations of the planet Uranus were 
in correspondence with the planet Nep- 
tune. 

On the side of himself as individual, as 
we have seen, man is related to the earth 
with all it contains to satisfy the needs of 
the body. We wish also to determine the 
nature and dimensions of the sphere to 
Avhich he is related as social. 

We have seen that, even within national 
boundaries, human life comes to be fertile 
in great men, great deeds, and great art, 
when the expression of it is social, rather 
than individual. With such disposition of 



106 POWER. 



her national life force, Greece readied an 
unparalleled height of grandeur and in- 
fluence. But all outside of Greece were 
esteemed as barbarians. The barbarian 
hordes around her state were like so many 
walls, which kept the waves of national 
life from passing out into any world-Avide 
sea. The limits were soon reached, then 
the waves receded, to be thrown back 
again in quick succession against the en- 
compassing walls. Was this not in viola- 
tion of the law and nature of the expression 
which the social side of man, by its very 
structure, is inclined to give of itself ? Is 
it not, by its nature, disposed to pass out in 
accordance with moral laws, which have no 
boundaries and limits ? And were not the 
walls they permitted their hate to build of 
the barbarians on the outside to arrest the 
outward flow of their national life, the evi- 
dence of a tacit treaty mth their selfish- 
ness ? Did these not, after all, bear mtness 



POWER. 107 



to a hampered and halted surrender to the 
nobler side of their nature ? Did they not 
show that the Greeks were only willing to 
give social expression to their national life, 
as far as the boundary lines of Achai ? Too 
noble to permit the emphasis to rest on the 
individual side of her people, as separate 
members of the state, she lifted narrowness 
and selfishness into greater place by giving 
them national form. 

Too great of breadth to be individually 
selfish, she was not great enough to be 
nationally unselfish. The individual sides 
of themselves her people sacrificed on the 
altars of the state to her national unity, 
she transmuted into contempt and hatred 
of other nations. Selfishness only passed 
from the individual to the state. Retained 
by the state, it worked itself back into the 
individuals again, when the unity of the 
state was disintegrated. Do we not have 
in the limitations which Greece attempted 



108 POWEE. 



to put on tlie expression which the social 
nature of man would give of itself, the real 
secret of their downfall ? If, while giving 
even limited social expression to her 
national life, Greece developed a civilization 
so rich, how much greater might have been 
her contribution to human progress had not 
the seeds of disintegration been sown among 
her people through national enmity and 
hate. In the two hundred years which 
embraced the most fertile portion of her 
history she laid the foundation of thought. 
But it was only through thought that she 
sought to solve the problems of life and 
destiny. 

The social life of the Jews found only 
limited expression for itself. It was worked 
out into religious lines that were unlimited 
and all embracing, but this was in spite of 
their prejudices. 

Their compact social life, the vast depth 
and vigor of their social vitality, the tenacity 



POWER. 109 



with which they clung together, made it 
possible for them to lay the foundation of 
a religion and an ethics larger than they 
dreamed. Their scriptures, their prophets, 
and their saints were not possible in a soil 
less socially rich. 

Their devotion, their loyalty, their 
voluntary subordination of private to public 
interests, their religious fidelity fitted them 
to become the children of God. The sum- 
mit of civilization they reached enabled 
them to see and to transcribe the outlines 
of the kingdom of heaven. They ascended 
high enough the mount of being to recog- 
nize the laws necessary to regulate human 
conduct. But they permitted their narrow- 
ness and prejudice to build of the Gentiles 
about them, walls to limit the outflow of 
their national life. Hate for the unfortunate 
people without, could not be without its 
influence on the lives of those within. 

The selfishness which, as a nation, they 



110 POWER. 



cherislied toward other people, reproduced 
itself at lengtli in tlieir own lives. From 
tlie children of God tliey descended until 
they became the children of the devil. 
The visions of their nobler men were 
discounted and despised. The selfishness 
that put them against the Gentiles, finally 
put them against one another ; and while 
they kept together in a certain sense, in 
spite of the upper and nether mill stones 
of history, it was rather in memory of what 
they had been, than of what they were. 

In the civilization of Kome, again, limita- 
tions were put on the expression of the 
social side of man's nature. Within the 
precincts of Rome, under her eagles and 
Mdthin her roads, there was a sinking of 
the individual and an expression of the so- 
cial side, that has been rarely equaled in 
history. It was this merging of the indi- 
vidual units into the social whole of Eome, 
that made it possible for her to formulate 



powm. Ill 



the legal measures and provisions wliicli con- 
tinue to protect human life and property. 
But sacrifice, companionship, social cohesion 
on the inside, could not, for many centuries, 
be accompanied with fierce opposition and 
cruel hate for others on the outside. It 
was inevitable that sooner or later the dis- 
position on the outside would get distri- 
buted among the individuals on the inside. 

VI. 

The realm, then, to which man on the 
social side of himself is related, is larger 
than that encompassed by any national 
boundaries. The Greek, on the social side 
of himself, was larger than Achai, the Jew 
than Palestine, and the Roman than the 
Empire. The Greek developed thought, 
the Jew produced religion, and the Roman 
formulated law. But the larger side of 
man's nature is not met by thought simply, 
or by religion simply, or by law simply, 



112 POWER. 



but by tlie combination of these in riglit 
proportions. 

Man, on tbe social side of himself, is cor- 
related through reciprocal relations to the 
human race. To limit the social expres- 
sion of man's life is to contract its nature, 
and to violate the moral laws in accord- 
ance with which it must act. The under- 
standing cannot rest in unrelated phe- 
nomena. Through science it reduces the 
forces of nature to one force, its energies to 
one energy, and its matter to its constituent 
elements. So the social nature must find 
harmony in the union and cohesion of scat- 
tered, separated human beings. It must 
have companionship, such as the relations 
of all men help to make. It must have a 
range as wdde as the world. Because of 
the continuities of life and thought secured 
through universal social cohesion, it must 
be able to pass and repass through the 
leno'th and breadth of human life. If 



POWER. 113 



man's social nature is to find its correlate, 
tlie race must be so completely one, so 
compact and contiguous in the spirit of 
fraternity and good will, as to make it 
possible for eacli man to share in the 
work, thought, and virtue of all men. In- 
dividuals must be gathered into the net- 
work of social relations, so that, instead of 
separate and isolated units, they shall be 
known as farmers, merchants, blacksmiths, 
mechanics, shoemakers, lawyers, doctors, 
editors, and ministers. The calling of each 
must relate to the well-being of all. Every 
man must make for others and receive in 
return for the supply of his own wants 
something of all the others make. Into 
the multiplex flow of exchanges the shoe- 
maker may put in simply one pair of shoes 
per day, as his personal contribution. To 
that extent he must be able to make levies 
on the contributions of all the rest. No 
one will be independent in an unrelated 



114 POWER. 



sense. All will be dependent, and eacli 
independent, tlirough dependence on the 
rest. The race, as civil society, will be at 
work under all climes, and on all soils, pro- 
ducing the infinite variety of goods for the 
world's market. By the specialization and 
division of labor, we will have great in- 
crease of skill and the multiplication of all 
]3roducts. People will be at work raising 
coifee and drugs in Brazil, tea in China, 
creating a myriad of jnanufactures in Eng- 
land, France, and Germany, growing fruits 
on the Mediterranean Islands ; these then 
will be gathered by various means of trans- 
portation and loaded on shij^s and cars, to 
be carried to every place on earth ; that 
everyone may have the whole earth to 
serve him, while on his part he renders 
service to all. 

VII. 
The universal organization of the human 
race into one social whole has been the 



POWER. 115 



grand, far-off event, toward wliicli tlie 
whole creation and tlie wliole process of 
history has moved. Toward this the race 
has been moving through all the fierce an- 
tagonisms and bloody ^vars of the past. 

Pestilences, which have decimated the 
ranks of men, and earthquakes, which have 
swallowed up great cities, have contributed 
toward this consummation. 

The genius of men like Alexander the 
Great has been used to break up the nar- 
row and provincial groupings into which 
men had settled, that a way might be 
opened for the distribution of products 
and the circulation of ideas. 

In the early history of the race, the 
process of organization began. Every 
great man and every great movement 
helped toward its enlargement. Abraham, 
getting up from Ur of the Chaldees, and 
moving with his family and his herds across 
the plains of Syria, to plant a government 



116 POWER. 



in Palestine, widened its sphere. Phoenicia, 
the strongest maritime power of ancient 
times, while she had no motive but gain for 
crowding every port with her ships, and 
for turning the world into an exchange, 
did augment the knowledge of men and in- 
crease the relations of men. The Jews, by 
their comj)act, social organization, lifted 
their national life into a great civilization. 
This civilization they sought to make pro- 
vincial ; they sought to fence themselves 
off, with all they had accumulated of de- 
votion and law and literature, from the rest 
of mankind. But their social pulveriza- 
tion, due to their sins, helped forward uni- 
versal com23anionsliip. They moved out 
into other parts of the world. They set- 
tled along the Black Sea and the Caspian 
Sea. They went into Asia Minor and back 
into Spia. They took up their abode in 
Alexandria and along the Mediterranean 
coast. Wherever they went, they carried 



POWER 117 



their civilization ; their synagogue, in which 
to teach their knowledge of the one God ; 
their Moses, to guide by his law their con- 
duct ; and their David, to soothe, with his 
songs, their sorrow. 

The marvelous productions of Grecian 
thought and skill were kept, for a time, 
from the barbarians. They attempted a 
monopoly of beauty. But the breaking up 
of their Commonwealth hastened the com- 
ing of universal fraternity. They planted 
their civilization in Asia Minor. They 
went over to Syria, down to Alexandria, 
and around the Mediterranean Sea. Wher- 
ever they went they carried their language 
and their philosophy. The Romans broke 
down the walls between different tribes, 
and brought them under one law. They 
built roads into all parts of the civilized 
world, and thus prepared the first great 
highways of travel. 

Looking from this distance^ back upon 



118 POWER. 



the movements of these great peoples, it 
seems as if they might have been, on set 
purpose, devising schemes and laying plans 
for bringing the world of mankind to- 
gether. It really looks as if all peoples 
above the grade of the savage had been 
unconsciously and in spite of themselves 
working for the unity of the race. The 
very walls that have been raised to keep 
men apart have been battered down and 
used to make roads to bring them together. 
The mountains, that served as barriers to 
separate them, have been tunneled to unite 
them. The oceans, that seemed absolutely 
to insui'e isolation, are now the favorite 
means of communication. All inventions 
and discoveries have heljDed to the practical 
oneness of the race. 

The mariner's compass, gunpowder, the 
printing press, the steam engine, the elec- 
tric telegraph, the sewing machine, the 
spectroscope, the electric light, the tele- 



POWER. 119 



phone, with the phonograph and micro- 
phone, have wrought for this end. The 
discovery of the sun's place in the heavens, 
and of the shape and movements of the 
earth; the discovery of America and of 
the law of gravitation ; the discovery of 
the cii'culation of the blood and of the 
wonderful remedies in natoi'e which relieve 
the ills of the body, have all reduced dif- 
ferences and augmented unity. Theologies, 
which have divided men into religious 
partisans, fomenting strife, and producing 
wars ; which have separated men into 
parties bitter and revengeful ; have grown 
kinder and humaner as the years have 
passed, and tend now to unite men, rather 
than to divide them. Philosophies, which 
kept men apart under the heads of nom- 
inalist and realist, sensationalist and ideal- 
ist, are now deduced from a broader 
survey of the facts, and tend to harmony 
rather than conflict. 



120 POWER. 



From tlie beginning nature and human 
effort have wrought together for universal 
good will and social organization. Lapses 
have been frequent and the net gain of 
fraternity small, but from age to age, with- 
out cessation and without intermission, in 
volume and sweej:), it has been increasing. 

VIII. 

Because of the limited knowledge men 
had of the uses of power in the past, the 
growth of universal social organization 
has been slow. Methods of intercommu- 
nication between nations wide apart were 
meager, hence the people in one division 
of the globe could know but little of the 
people who lived in another. Any part of 
the earth not understood w^as counted as 
desert, and any people not known were 
considered barbarian. But with the new 
uses and applications of power, all this is 
changed. The world now lies open to all. 



POWER. 121 



The antipodes are neighbors. By hitching 
the sun's heat to the flying train, and the 
canvas to the favoring winds, and the 
lightning to human thought, all races on 
the globe stand face to face. The world is 
being encompassed, and no natural obsta- 
cles are now permitted to stand in the way 
of railway lines, or of submarine cables. 
All mountain chains are being tunneled, 
all chasms spanned, all oceans traversed, 
and all straits bridged. The continents 
of the earth are now connected by 125,000 
miles of submai'ine electric cable, and 
countries are crossed by thousands of miles 
of railroad lines. With an abiding and ir- 
repressible, even if unconscious sense, that 
on the social side of himself he is related 
to the whole human race, man has well- 
nigh subdued the earth, and removed the 
obstacles that opposed the realization of 
his larger nature. Already great enter- 
prises are being contemplated, which look 



122 POWER. 



to the speedy removal of whatever remain- 
ing obstacles there are to world-wide com- 
panionship among men. Some of the 
great enterprises already projected which 
are to hel23 toward universal brotherhood, 
have been noted by Mr. Charles Hallock. 
A railway is to be built from Joppa to Je- 
rusalem in Palestine, and a bridge across 
the Straits of Dover near Folkestone. 

The Mombasa and Nyanza Railway in 
Africa is to connect the Nile with the 
interior lakes and with the coast. A rail- 
way is to be constructed across Siberia, 
from St. Petersburg to Behring Strait. 
Upon this side a railway is to be built 
across Alaska to Behring Strait, while 
Behring Strait is to be bridged or ferried. 
A canal is to be cut across the Isthmus of 
Corinth in Grreece, to connect the ^gean 
Sea with the Gulf of Corinth. There is to 
be a ship canal around Niagara Falls, and 
a railroad from Quebec to Belle Isle in 



POWER 123 



Labrador, with connectiDg ocean steam- 
sliip lines to Medford in Wales. There is 
to be an ocean cable from Clew Bay, Ire- 
land, to Greeny Island, Strait of Belle Isle, 
1900 miles long. And a railroad from 
Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Hudson Bay, and 
steamship line thence to Liverpool. 

A railway is contemplated from Winni- 
peg to the Saskatchewan Eiver, across the 
Northwest Territory. A tunnel is to be 
cut under the Hudson River at New York, 
and a tunnel under the St. Clair River, 
between Sarnia and Port Huron, Mich. 
That the Panama and Nicaragua canals 
have been projected and partially completed 
is known the world over. A tunnel is to 
be made through the Atlas Mountains in 
Russia, and the great Northern Railroad 
Company is to make one through the Rocky 
Mountains in Montana, and another is to be 
cut through the Sierras from Truckee River, 
Nevada, into California. There is to be a 



124 POWER. 



canal from Knoxville, Tenn., througli Ala. 
bania to the Gulf of Mexico, and one from 
Chicago to the Mississippi River, which is 
to cost $25,000,000. A ship railway 60 
miles long is to be completed from Geor- 
gian Bay to Lake Ontario, connecting the 
Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, 
costing $12,000,000. A canal is contem- 
plated from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico, 
and also a ship railway around the Dalles 
of the Columbia River. There is to be a 
ship canal across New Jersey to the Atlan- 
tic Ocean, 60 miles long, and a ship rail- 
way to connect the Gulf of St Lawrence 
with the Bay of Fundy, 12 miles long, to 
cost $12,000,000. There are to be steam 
lines from Tampa, Fla., to all parts of 
the West Indies, a longitudinal railway 
through the axis of North and South 
America, from Chicago to the Argentine 
Republic ; steam lines fi'om Vancouver in 
British Columbia, to Japan and Australia, 



POWER 125 



and steam lines from New York to the 
Carribbees and tlie Windward Islands. 
There are to be steam lines from Scotland 
to the North Cape and the Antarctic 
Ocean; stated voyages between Sitka, 
Alaska, and Point Barrow in the Arctic 
Ocean, and steamboat navigation of all 
the great lakes and rivers of Siberia, 
British America, and Central Africa. 
Ports of entry are to be established in 
all countries to furnish terminal facilities 
for these far reaching lines of transpor- 
tation. 

We are to have federation among the 
nations, as we now have it among the 
States of the American Union. The social 
cohesion, once national, is to be interna- 
tional. All are to think for each, and each 
is to think for all. All are to work for 
each, and each is to work for all. All are 
to plan for the good of each, and each is to 
plan for the good of all. Thus the inequal- 



126 POWER 



ities of life are to be reduced, and the little- 
ness of life is to be redressed. 

As all tlie power in tlie vine and its 
branches to make grapes is expended in 
tlie rounding and sweetening of eacli grape, 
so all tlie power in tlie social wliole to 
make men will be reproduced in eacli man. 
All the justice in the race will regulate 
each man's will, all the thought in the race 
Avill I'eplenish each man's mincl, and all the 
love in the race will feed each man's heart. 
Nothing less than this social whole, in 
which are bound together in one organic 
body the lives, the welfare, and the hopes 
of all, is the correlate of the social nature 
of man. Toward such a world-wide organ- 
ism, each living in the whole and the whole 
living in each, his social nature reaches out 
and is never at home until it is found. 
Such universal brotherhood would be im- 
possible without power in all its manifold 
forms. This serves the social body as 



POWER 12 V 

bread serves the individual body. Power, 
as the servant of the social body, waits on 
each man through his relations with the 
social whole. A city builds gas works and 
finds it possible to let down the price in 
proportion to the number of those who use 
it. A railroad company can lower the rate 
on passengers and freight in proportion to 
the number of men who travel and the 
volume of freight transported. The price 
of a newspaper goes up or down as the 
number of subscribers increases or dimin- 
ishes. Mr, Edison expects to get electricity 
from the disturbed conditions of the air, 
without the use of fuel. This will make 
the conditions of life easier by one-half ; 
and then, as the number of people increases 
who avail themselves of the uses of power, 
the conditions of living will still be easier. 
Not only will the unity which comes 
through social organization lower the rate 
of insurance and the price of the necessi- 



128 POWER. 



ties of life, but this increased force of the 
social whole will tend to the moral health 
of the people in the same degree. Health 
in one part of the body will be brought to 
bear to correct disease in another part. 
The conscience of the whole will be turned 
into the degraded sections of our great 
cities, and the sympathy and love of all 
will be called out to reclaim them. Star- 
vation in one part of the globe ^yW\ be met 
by the over-supply of bread in another. 
Oppression and tyranny in one nation will 
be opposed by the sense of fairness and 
overcome by the love of freedom in all the 
rest. As climatic conditions are made 
friendly to life by the circulation of 
oceanic and atmospheric currents, so moral 
health will be preserved by the circula- 
tion of the currents of conscience and 
justice. 



POWER. 129 



IX. 

Tlie empliasis is to be kept on tlie social 
rather tlian tlie individual side of human 
nature ; not that personality may be lost, 
but that it may be gained. 

The social mass that constricts and 
squeezes the single life until the virility of 
self-assertion and the right of private initia- 
tive are destroyed, is no improvement on 
Bedouin isolation. The latter brutalizes 
life, vt^hile the former eviscerates it. The 
eye does not lose its capacity for sight, 
and its place of peculiar responsibility by 
being brought into reciprocal relations 
along with other organs in the same body. 
It would have no meaning and no power 
of vision apart from relations with other 
organs. The ear is not discounted, nor are 
its wonderful functions belittled amid the 
manifold members which work together in 
the same human frame. Its position of 



130 POWER. 



honor is secured to it by the organic rela- 
tions it sustains to the other members. 
The foot, the hand, and the tongue find 
themselves and their uses as they unite 
together in one living whole. The lone 
Bedouin, with no laws and no relations, 
seems to have all liberty, but in reality he 
has none. He is as com^Dletely without 
meaning as Avould be the finger separated 
irom the hand. The man of whom nature 
is a prophecy is not the being in the woods 
whose home is a cave and whose food is 
wild meat ; but it is the man in society, 
whose home all ^soods and metals and 
stones have helped to build, and ^vhose food 
all soils and skies and seas have helped to 
produce. 

The emphasis is to be kept on the social 
side of human nature, because it is through 
that side of himself that man is to pass into 
the world-wide work and the glorious 
destiny for which he is fitted. Through 



POWER 131 



that side of himself he moves out into order, 
and strength, and freedom. All men whose 
names are cherished in history, passed into 
place, influence, and honor through the 
social side of human nature. 

In passing through the social side of 
himself, the life man finds is a million times 
larger and richer than the life he loses. 
That men might find the life that belonged 
to them, the only life worth living, the 
tendency from the first has been toward 
the solidarity of the race. The relations 
growing out of such solidarity are constitu- 
tive of the being of each man. The im- 
portant properties of an acid cannot be 
known, when it is considered out of rela- 
tion with an alkali. What a thing is for 
another, that it is in itself. So what a 
man is through relations with others, that 
he is in himself. But what he is in himself 
cannot be known until he comes into rela- 
tions with others. 



132 POWER. 



Solidarity is not to swamp single lives, 
but single lives are to come to all tliat is 
peculiar and high in themselves through 
solidarity. The universe is to preserve 
relations with each private spirit. By the 
organization of men into one social whole, 
pro\H[sion is made for each man to partici- 
pate in the life of humanity. It is intended 
that all the oceans of life shall reach, 
through their waves, the shores of each 
man's being, and leave deposits of all their 
wealth in each man's spirit. When we speak 
of the horse, the eagle, the whale, it is under- 
stood that we are using generic terms, and 
are intended to refer to no particular horse 
or eagle or whale. Yet in each horse the 
species is reproduced, and in each eagle 
the species is epitomized, and in each whale 
the whole whale type is summarized. This 
is done in the case of the lower animals, 
without their thought or volition. No 
universal relations are necessary among 



POWER. 133 



whales, for eacli whale to have within it- 
self all the peculiarities and furnishments 
possessed by all whales. The species are 
to be realized in each man, too ; but this is 
to be accomplished through social relations 
among all men. All the men in the world 
must touch each man, to call forth the 
capacities which lie folded within his life. 
Humanity, as parcelled out in nations, 
generations, epochs, must lift itself into 
the being of each man ; as the ocean, par- 
celled out in Atlantics, Pacifies, Indians, 
Arctics, Antarctics, lifts itself into each 
wave. 

Power, parcelled out in gravitation, heat, 
and electricity surrounding the globe ; ad- 
vertised in every apple's fall, declared in 
every flash from the clouds, and present in 
every sunbeam ; stands ready to make 
universal brotherhood, not simply an ideal, 
running through the dreams of poets and 
prophets, but an actual fact. The recog- 



134 POWER. 



nition of power, as the provision made 
for the social nature of man, is enabling 
us to realize the dreams of prophets and 
poets. 



TRUTH. 



" A century is a formula ; an epoch is an expressed 
thought. One such thought-expressed civilization 
passes to another. The centuries are the phrases of 
civilization ; what she says here she does not repeat 
there. But these mysterious phrases are linked to- 
gether: logic — the logos — is within them, and their 
series constitutes progress. In all these, phrase ex- 
pressions of a single thought, the divine thought, we 
are slowly deciphering the word fraternity. 

" All light is at some point condensed into a flame ; 
liiiewise every epoch is condensed in a man, The 
man dead, the epoch is concluded: God turns over 
the leaf. Dante dead, a period is placed at the end 
of the thirteenth century: John Huss may come. 
Shakspere dead, a period is placed at the end of the 
sixteenth century. After this part, who contains 
and epitomizes all philosophy, may come the philoso- 
phers — Pascal, Descartes, Moliere, Le Sage, Montes- 
quieu, Diderot, Beaumarchais." 



CHAPTER III. 

THE PROVISIOISr FOR THE ESTTELLECTUAL 
IS^ATURE OF MAN. 

Truth and reality stand for the same 
thing. Reality is truth out of the mind, 
and truth is reality in the mind. Reality 
is objective truth, and truth is subjective 
reality. But all reality is in relation to 
mind ; objective reality to the divine mind, 
and subjective reality to the human 
mind. Objective reality is the realized 
thought of God ; subjective reality is the 
realized thought of man. The correspond- 
ence of thoughts to things is called scien- 
tific truth. Objective reality is truth, 
because it corresponds to the thought of 
God. Knowledge in the human mind is 
truth when it corresponds to objective re- 

137 



138 TRUTH. 



ality or the expressed thouglit of God- 
When words and conduct correspond to 
knowledge, we have truth in the domain of 
morals. 

In saying that objective reality is the 
realized thought of God, we denote its 
unity. This is not to destroy the particu- 
lars of which it is composed, or to swamp 
their individuality in an inarticulate mass, 
but simply to indicate their oneness. 

When the observer looks out into the 
universe, which includes and shuts him 
round, he is imj)ressed by the infinite vari- 
eties and diversities which everywhere meet 
his gaze. No two things are alike. No 
two leaves, no two drops of Avater, no two 
snowflakes, no two apples, no two faces. 
Every particular thing seems to be persist- 
ently determined to differ, in some respect 
at least, from everything else. The history 
of true knowledge begins, however, with 
the observation of resemblance and simi- 



TRUTH. 139 

larity — ^jiist beneath tlie surface of differ- 
ence and variety. The lightning that 
appears on the bosom of the cloud, like the 
writing of some awful fiend, is seen to be 
the same with the gentle sparks emitted 
when a tag of silken ribbon is drawn 
briskly between the fingers. The power 
that pulls the ball to the ground is seen to 
be the same as that which keeps the sun 
in his place. 

The plant lifts itself up as but a sum of 
organized varieties ; but every part, corolla, 
petal, and stamen, is known to be only 
modified leaf. Keeping to their silent and 
lonely rounds since the dawn of time, are 
the stars in the heavens, differing in color, 
orbit, and size, but we now know that to 
understand the elements of which they are 
composed, we have only to lift our foot 
and see what the constituent parts of the 
earth beneath it are. Were objective real- 
ity one amorphous mass, it would not be 



140 TRUTH. 



intelligible. It is one and many, particular 
and universal, singular and manifold, con- 
crete and discrete. All things cohere in 
a centrality that includes and commands 
them. 

So true is it that unity underlies all dif- 
ference, that no single variety can be un- 
derstood, only as it is considered in relation 
with the whole of which it forms a part. 

No one could ever get a correct notion of 
a particular star by directing his entire at- 
tention to the study of that star. To 
understand it, he must study it through the 
S3'stem of which it forms a member, and in 
connection with all laws and forces related 
to it. Oxygen separate and distinct from 
other elements has no meaning. It gets its 
definition and significance from the things 
to which it is related. What it is for 
rocks and water and trees and globes, that 
it is in itself. But it must be seen in con- 
nection with these before we can know 



A 



TRUTH. 141 



what it is in itself. What an acid is for 
an alkali and for other things, that it is in 
itself. Alone, out of relation, we could 
kno^v absolutely nothing of it. Society is 
the organism that reveals to each person 
the nature of his own life. Out of contact 
and touch with other human beings, no 
one would ever know anything concern- 
ing himself. 

Objective reality embraces manifold 
variety, but it is the unity that presides 
over it that makes it intelligible. Dif- 
ference provokes questions and unity 
answers them. 

In calling objective reality truth, we 
tacitly assume the laws and relations con- 
stitutive of it. We could not speak of 
the truth of the globe, had there been no 
method in its formation, no order in its 
development, no system in its parts, and 
no relations between its constituent ele- 
ments. To speak of the truth of it, is to 



142 TRUTH. 



imply the thought of it, the intelligibility 
of it. Were it not the expression of mind, 
man's reason could find no truth in it. 
Scholars have been able, after long and 
painstaking study, to understand the 
meaning of Egyptian and Assyrian hiero- 
glyphics, but they never could have found 
thought in them, had they contained no 
thought. The original elements which 
make up the matter of the globe, have 
come into such relations with one another 
as that they make up the soil, rocks, water, 
trees, and animals ^ve see. Thought, then, 
is the result of the internal relations of 
the particles which compose it. These 
internal relations, too, constitute its intel- 
ligibility. The globe that wheels on its 
axis is objective. This may be taken into 
the mind, and by its synthesizing, organ- 
izing activity converted into a subjec- 
tive globe. The difference between 
the objective and the subjective globe 



TRUTH. 143 

will be, that one will be thouglit 
and the other will be thing. But the 
same internal relations found in the ob- 
jective globe will be preserved in the 
subjective, and the transcript of the globe 
that is held in thought will be truth in 
exact proportion as it corresponds to the 
material globe that rolls out of the mind. 
That an objective globe, which is a thing, 
may become a subjective globe, which is a 
thought and not a thing, implies that there 
is something in common between thoughts 
and things ; that is, the mind, by its con- 
stitution, is capable of apprehending and 
taking into itself the constitution and 
relations of things. This is its capacity 
for truth, and shows that truth is not 
foreign to it, but one with itself. 

The sides and angles of a right angle 
triangle have certain relations to one an- 
other. The square described on the 
hypotenuse of such an angle is equal to 



144 TRUTH. 



tlie squares described on tlie other two 
sides. This may be demonstrated on a 
piece of blank paper, or tlie mind may con- 
ceive a right angle triangle, and prove the 
proposition without making any marks at 
all. The constitutional relations which 
were in the natui'e of a right angle tri- 
angle are the same, whether it be drawn 
on paper or conceived by the imagination. 
The relations of the triangle make it 
intelligible, because they constitute its 
truth. 

I. 

To truth the intellect is related, as is the 
eye to light, and the ear to sound. If the 
eye were destroyed, the sun would not 
cease to shine. His light would still come 
upon hill and plain to feed the flowers and 
to disclose their beauty, but without the 
organ of vision no creature in the universe 
would be able to see the things which his 
light reveals. The ear does not create 



TRUTH. 145 

sound. Let it be forever sealed, and tlie 
Niagaras would still continue to fall and 
the tliunders to shake the heavens, but 
they would not be heard. The intellect 
does not create truth, but it is the only 
faculty with whicli man is endowed by 
which he is able to discover it. 

It was the error of the idealists that they 
made the order, laws, and relations of tilings 
as so many principles projected out of the 
the observer's own mind into the universe 
about him. What he seemed to see in 
things, were but modifications of his own 
mental states. The only order things had 
was in the observer's own mind. It was 
regarded not only as the pivot upon which 
the universe turned, but also as the crea- 
tive principle from which the universe 
took form. Apparently this was a great 
gain to mind, but it was at the expense of 
any real world for the mind to contemplate. 
It seemed to win a victory for the intelli- 



146 TRUTH. 



gence absolute and entire, but it was by 
shutting it up to its own shadowy abstrac- 
tions, and abandoning it in a shoreless and 
bottomless void to its own vain musings. 
The personal pronoun /was extended per- 
pendicularly and horizontally, till topways 
and sideways the whole of space and time 
was filled with it. No solid earth, no burn- 
ing sun, no rolling orbs were left. A great, 
illimitable, irresponsible ego became the 
sole occupant of all that is. 

This extreme idealism is in direct con- 
trast to the realism of the early thinkers. 
They taught that things depended on man 
neither for their existence nor there intelli- 
gibility. That each thing cari'ied the real 
intelligible essence as an ultimate fact in 
itself. Thought in man was but the reflec- 
tion of this intelligible essence in the thing, 
as the light in the mirror is but the reflec- 
tion of the light of the lamp. 

Of the two systems, extreme idealism is 



THUTH. 147 

preferable to extreme realism. All mind 
and no matter, is better than all matter and 
no mind. Thought with no place to stand, 
is better than a place to stand and no 
thought. The eye with nothing to see, is 
better than something to see and no eye. 

The solution which realism gave of the 
problem of existence, left no place for 
mind, the solution which idealism gave of 
it left no place for matter. But both the 
external world, upon which realism was 
founded, and the intelligence, upon which 
idealism was founded, are expressions of 
mind. The one as intelligible content, the 
other as combining active capacity and the 
intelligibility of the content, exactly corre- 
sponds to the active grasp of the capacity. 

11. 

But it must be remembered that the in- 
tellect which is the organ of truth, and 
objective reality which is abstract truth, do 



148 TBTITB. 



not come togetlier to form knowledge in 
any accidental way. 

A basket may be said to have capacity 
for holding potatoes, and potatoes may lend 
themselves as content to fill up the basket. 
But the union of potatoes and basket ; the 
one as content, the other as capacity, is 
only mechanical. The basket would serve 
as well to hold onions, or muskadines, or 
chinquepins, as potatoes, and the potatoes 
could be carried as ^vell in a wooden box 
or in a tin pan, as in a basket. No neces- 
sity inheres in the nature of a basket to 
contain potatoes, and no necessity is in the 
nature of potatoes to get into a basket. 
Truth and the intellect, however, are in- 
tended the one for the other. Truth is 
correlated to the intellect as the bird's vdng 
is to the atmosphere. Nothing can take 
hold of the truth but the intellect, and noth- 
ing can satisfy and furnish the intellect but 
truth. 



TRUTH. 149 

Abstract truth, or objective reality, is 
converted by the combining organizing ac- 
tivity of the mind into knowledge, and 
when this knowledge corresponds to the 
reality it is truth in the realm of 
thought. 

Before knowledge is possible, then, there 
must be an intelligence capable of know- 
ing, and an object capable of being known. 

How the intelligence and the know able 
object get together to foi-m knowledge is 
the most important question in philosophy. 
Upon the right settlement of it, everything 
depends. This has been the point about 
which the battle of thought, in modern 
times, has been most fiercely waged. If 
the mind firmly grasps the meaning of this 
problem and settles it right, it is almost 
sure to think right on other questions. If 
it is wrong here, it is sure to be wrong every- 
where else. Mistake here is as fatal to the 
correct solution of the question we are con- 



150 TRUTH. 



sidering, as would be the mistake that two 
and two make ^yq to the correct solution of 
a sum in arithmetic. 

III. 

The distance of a question from ordinary 
thought does not render it any the less im- 
portant, even for ordinary thinking. How 
the knowing intelligence and the knowable 
object get together to form knowledge is 
the most important problem to-day before 
the human mind. If writers would only 
take their bearings from the only rational 
solution that can be given to it, they would 
find half the books they are writing on the 
inspiration of the Scriptures, the existence 
of God, the divinity of Jesus Christ, 
agnosticism and materialism, unneces- 
sary. 

Agnosticism and materialism pass away 
with a correct theory of knowing. Labor 
and painstaking thought are involved in 



TRUTH. 151 

the task of getting a right theory of knowl- 
edge, but agnosticism and materialism are 
in line with ignorance and indolence. 

So, while few men ever ask themselves 
how the knowing intelligence and the know- 
able object get together to form knowledge, 
millions of men are affected, even in their 
practical life, by the answer which is given 
to the question. Someone has said that not 
more than six men in any one age ever read 
Plato or understand him. Yet for the six 
men Plato comes down through the ages. 
The six men who understand him translate 
him into the vernacular of the one hundred 
men who live on the next plane of thought 
below them. 

The one hundred translate him into the 
common language of one thousand below 
them. These, in turn, translate Plato into 
the ordinary thought of the millions below 
them. So it happens at length that Plato 
gets so universally known, that not a 



152 TRUTH. 



laborer in the field but Avears his hat after 
one style, rather than another, because 
Plato wrote. 

Doubtless it would have been considered 
a very unimportant question two hundred 
years ago, as to whether heat were an 
igneous fluid or a mode of motion. Per- 
haps not more than two or three men 
wrestled with the question for centuries 
before it was settled. By the masses of 
the people they were regarded as wasting 
their time in vain and idle speculation. 
By an experiment made by Count Bum- 
ford, it was put beyond the possibility of 
doubt that heat was not an igneous fluid, 
but a mode of motion. Was this a ques- 
tion that concerned the multitudes, that 
two or three men spent a hundred years 
talking about and torturing their brains to 
understand ? There is not a single human 
being in the ci^dlized world to-day whose 
interests and welfare have not been touched 



TRUTH. 153 



by the settlement of it. There are millions 
of peasants in Kussia who never heard of 
Count Rumford, or of an igneous fluid, or 
of caloric, who have this present year been 
fed by flour sent them by the western 
millers and transported on the strength of 
the conclusion that heat is not an igneous 
fluid, but a mode of motion. Every steam- 
car that crosses the continent, and eveiy 
steamboat that crosses the ocean, moves in 
the wake of this same conclusion. At first 
we see some algebraic formulas, an array of 
curves and figures, that practical people 
said had nothing to do with everyday life. 
After a while we see the abstract conclu- 
sions reached by aid of the algebraic 
signs, and settled by the test of experiment, 
translated into steam engines, and trans- 
porting even the peasants of India and 
Mexico from one end of the country to the 
other. We see the abstract conclusions 
of the few thinkers turned into steam to 



154 TRUTH. 



spin the people's clotlies and grind tlie 
people's bread. 

In 1632 tliere was born at Wrington, 
Somersetshire, England, a boy^ Avho was 
educated at the University of Oxford. In 
the esteem of his contemporaries he de- 
voted his time to the consideration of sub- 
jects of no practical value. In the course 
of events he put the results of his study 
into a book known as " The Essay on the 
Human Understanding." Few people read 
it. But the few who did read it started the 
ideas of it to circulating. They were trans- 
lated into French and Latin, and were soon 
potent influences in the intellectual life of 
Europe. Were they practical and did they 
concern the ordinary affairs of men ? They 
created the Encyclopedists of France. 
These learned men were the authors of the 
radical opinions which cut the people from 
the moorings of traditional and age-long 
thought. The fire and the blood of the 



TRUTH. 155 



Revolution were tlie legitimate expressions 
of the speculative essay of John Locke that 
not one in ten thousand ever read. The 
persons whose heads were cut off in the 
Reign of Terror must have thought the 
ideas exceedingly practical that led to the 
destruction of social and political institu- 
tions, that took form in a movement which 
respected neither law nor property nor life. 
The speculative opinions of John Locke 
not only hel23ed to create the French Revo- 
lution, but they led to the idealisDi of 
Bishop Berkeley, and this in turn to the 
skeptical philosophy of David Hume. The 
modern successors of Hume are John Stuart 
Mill, Herbert Spencer, Leslie Stephen, 
Frederic Harrison, and Professor Huxley, 
whose contributions have been given to the 
popular reviews, and which have been read 
by all intelligent people. Every man in 
Europe and America has been influenced 
both in conduct and character by the spec- 



156 TRUTH. 



ulative " Essay on tlie Human Under- 
standing." 

Lockers speculative pbilosopliy passed 
througli Berkeley to Hume, and through 
Hume readied Kant, the great German 
thinker, and resulted in the " Critique of 
Pure Reason." This led to Fichte and 
Schelling, and finally to Hegel. This led 
to Heidelberg and the Tubingen school, to 
Bauer and Dewette, to extreme idealism 
and rationalism, translated into books and 
reviews and newspapers, and read by all 
the people, affecting their thought and life. 

Even people who never read, who never 
open a book or a news]3aper, have been 
influenced by the subtle piece of specula- 
tive reasoning given to the w^orld by the 
great sensational philosopher of England. 
The spirit of utilitarianism and secularism 
prevalent throughout the world at the 
present time is easily traceable to it. 



TRUTH. 157 



IV. 

Before we can possibly know that trutt 
is the provision for the intellectual nature 
of man, we must determine whether the 
knowing faculties, which he finds himself 
to possess, are capable of grasping truth 
and turning it into knowledge. The fight 
of skepticism in modern times has been 
made upon the knowing faculties. It is 
useless to talk about the existence of God, 
the inspiration of the Scriptures, the divin- 
ity of Christ, or the immortality of the soul, 
if the human intellect is, by its limitations, 
denied the possibility of knowing anything 
whatsoever concerning these things. It is 
a waste of time for me to attempt to dip 
water out of the ocean with a bucket with 
no bottom to it. What is the relation of 
the intelligence to the outer world ? Does 
the outside world create knowledge in the 
mind by the impressions it makes upon it, 



158 TBUT3. 

or does the mind bring something to the 
outside world which converts this raw ma- 
terial into knowledge ? Is knowledge a re- 
flection of the outer, or a creation of the 
inner? Does nature work it in us, or is 
there some spontaneous, creative, organiz- 
ing, mental activity Avithin us that takes 
the material presented by nature, turning 
it into a rational sj^stem of knowledge ? 
What is the relation between the being 
that knows and the object known ? How 
much of the creative factor of knowledge 
does nature supply ? How much does man 
supply ? Can a man with deranged facul- 
ties get order out of a rational world ? Can 
a man of sane mind get order out of an 
irrational world ? If there is to be a ra- 
tional system of knowledge built up in the 
mind, must there not be reason in the 
thinker and reason in the outside world, 
coming into organic relations, the one with 
the other? As to how we regard this 



TRTTTB. 150 



question will determine how we regard 
truth, and whether or not it is possible for 
us to know it. 

V. 

The human mind has never been able to 
resist the conviction that there is such a 
thing as truth. Though baffled and de- 
feated a thousand times, in every age, in its 
attempt to formulate truth, it has never 
been able to consent to give up the search 
for it. Interest in truth has kept alive and 
fostered the belief that the mind has power 
to understand it. The mind's passion for 
truth has deepened its confidence in the 
faculties with which it is ever trying to dis- 
cover it. The everlasting longing to know 
truth has been taken as implicit capacity to 
find it. Philosophic systems have been 
only so many devices and creations of the 
mind with which to take hold of truth. 
The methods proposed, in the first stages 



160 TRUTH. 



of philosophic thinking, for getting at the 
truth were crude, as the first instruments 
devised for cultivating the soil and getting 
out of it what there was in it for food, 
were crude. Thales, Pythagoras, and 
Anaximander first attempted to penetrate 
objective reality, to know its cause, to 
bring its multiplicity to unity, and to re- 
duce its variety to law. The ever-changing 
phenomena by which they were surrounded 
necessarily eluded the meager theories with 
which they attempted to reduce them to 
order. They prejDared the way, however, 
for systems which accommodated a greater 
number of facts. They made possible Plato 
and Aristotle, who, ^vith hypotheses more 
complicated and more consonant with the 
reality they sought to grasp, found truth 
enough to keep the human race thinking 
for two thousand years. The blocks of 
truth they quarried from the mines of ob- 
jective reality were used to carry up the 



TRUTH. 161 



theological and speculative temples of tlie 
Middle Ages. 

After the failure of scholasticism, which 
denotes a period in human thought rather 
than a particular system of philosophy, 
Lord Bacon proposed the method of ma- 
terial induction to bring the mind into 
relations of knowledge with truth. He 
emphasized the study of the outward facts, 
their classification and organization. In 
his esteem, truth was to be reached by the 
consideration of actual, tangible things. 
Man was the interpreter of nature, and not 
necessarily its interpretation. 

Truth in the mind was the image of 
objective truth. It differed from truth out 
of the mind, as the direct from the reflected 
ray. He failed from lack of adequate 
recognition of one of the important factors 
in the problem of truth. Descartes' method 
was more successful, because larger and 
completer recognition was taken of man. 



16S TRUTH. 



He began by doubting eveiytbing that 
could be doubted. Heir to tlie beliefs of 
all the ages, he determined to summon 
these, one by one, before the bar of reason, 
and force them to show cause for their 
existence. Everyone was to be called into 
court and put out that could be doubted. 
The existence of a God was called up and 
doubted, condemned, and put out. The 
existence of an external world was called 
up, doubted, condemned, and put out. In 
the same summary and shorthand way, 
man and mind were doubted and put out. 
All positive beliefs were doubted. After 
his process of elimination, he found himself 
without God, Avithout man, without mind, 
without a permanent external world. All 
that remained after emptying himself of all 
mental furnishments and beliefs was the 
fact that he doubted. But he could not 
doubt without thinking. In the veiy act 
of doubting, he thought. If one thinks. 



TTtUTB. 163 

he must think something. The nearest 
something to the thinking subject is his 
own personal being. So he thought him- 
self and concluded, " I think, therefore, I 
am." But he was not always ; he began 
to be. So he must think of a being 
that caused him. The being that caused 
him must himself be uncaused. More- 
over, there could not be an uncaused 
cause, without an effect. Creation, then, 
with which he stood face to face, was the 
effect of the great first cause. Thus Des- 
cartes' method, based upon tbe thought 
underlying doubt, led him, necessarily, to 
himself, the object of his thought ; and to 
God, the cause of himself ; and to creation, 
the effect of the great first cause or Grod. 
Through his process of coming at the prob- 
lem, he was able, rationally, to believe in 
the existence of himself, the outer world, 
and God, the cause of both. Descartes, as 
a thinker, was affirmative, positive, con- 



164 TRUTH. 



structive. He only doubted down to tlie 
point wliere lie could doubt no longer, tliat 
lie might have a sure found ation upon which 
to build. His contribution gave fresh cour- 
age and inspiration to the human mind. 
He failed to determine the boundary 
line between the self and the not-self, 
between mind and matter, between the 
thinker and the creation mth which he 
stood face to face. This was the work 
Spinoza proposed for himself, and in the 
celebrated Ethics, published to the world 
at the peril of his life and soul, imagined 
the task mathematically performed. The 
two poles of Descartes' philosophy, the self 
and the not-self,he united in Descartes' cause, 
and named the whole sum substance. The 
self and the not-self reappeared as attributes 
of substance, which Spinoza named thought 
and extension. All the phenomena in the 
universe, uiental or material, were but 
modes of the infinite substance. The 



TRUTH. 165 



result of his thinking was pure pantheism. 
He reached a sort of mechanical unity, but 
he left no place for the affirmation of dis- 
tinctions. His Ethics was large enough to 
accommodate everything, but in such a way 
as to preserve the individuality of nothing. 
A thought is valuable in proportion to its 
capacity to take hold of things as they are. 
The old opinion that heat was caloric, 
served as a working hypothesis for the mind 
a long time. In the view of those who 
held it, it was satisfactory and adequate, 
But it never really got hold of heat, be- 
cause it contradicted the nature of heat. 
The astronomers thought, for a long time, 
that they had come into relations of knowl- 
edge with the stars through the Ptolemaic 
conception of the heavenly bodies. They 
were mistaken, however. Their theory did 
not fit the real celestial order at all. As a 
Avork of genius, Spinoza's Ethics is one of 
the most remarkable productions ever for- 



166 TRUTH. 

mulated by the human intellect, but it con- 
ducted the mind awaj from truth, rather 
than into relations with it. Locke began 
his work as a philosopher, as Descartes 
began his, by looking into his own mind. 
Descartes began by casting out everything 
that could be doubted. Locke began by 
making an inventory of what his mind con- 
tained. Descartes wanted to find out how 
much he could know, as measured by what 
remained after throwing out everything 
that could be doubted. Locke sought to 
see how little he could know, by putting 
the sensations and impressions he found in 
his mind on the witness stand, and getting 
them to tell how they came to be there, 
and where they came from. Descartes 
began by a study of the intelligence, the 
instrument of knowledge. Locke began by 
a study of the facts which, by some means 
or other, had found their way into his 
intelligence. Descartes got rid of every 



TRUTH. 167 



belief that could be doubted. Locke ran 
every idea out of his mind that had been 
imported from the outside world, in order 
that he might see if the mind had any con- 
stitutional power to produce any. Des- 
cartes, having dislodged all inherited beliefs, 
such as took for granted the existence of 
God, man, mind, and outer world, found 
some mental laws, capabilities, and tenden- 
cies left, which compelled a man, if he 
thought at all, to think in a given way ; 
and if he thought on given lines, to think 
to a given conclusion. Not being able to 
get these laws out of the mind, he called 
them innate ideas. They were in the 
mind by structure and constitution. 

After Locke had carefully examined 
the contents of his mind, he declared 
they were all imported from an outside 
realm. Nothing he found in the mind 
was indigenous to the soil. When all 
foreign importations were removed, noth- 



168 TRUTH. 



ing remained but an empty vessel. Tlie 
mind was nothing but a receptacle, into 
whicli the senses dumped such objects as 
they happened to find lying round loose 
in the outside world. It had no more 
power to understand or turn into thought 
what was brought in than a piece of white 
paper had to read and interpret what was 
written upon it ; or than a kettle to recog- 
nize the liquid making up its contents as 
water. It is like a table of wax ; any sort 
of letters may be graven upon it, but the 
table cannot read them. 

Locke proposed to find out what the 
mind could know by counting and tabulat- 
ing the things he found in his own intelli- 
gence. This is very much like trying to 
understand the nature of light, by consid- 
ering the blue things and green things and 
red things the light discloses. All bodies, 
it is said, which the light enables us to 
see, attract each other in proportion to 



TRUTH. 169 

their mass, and inversely as tlie squares of 
their distance. The law of gravity, which 
regulates the bodies light reveals to us, is 
not the law of light. We can never un- 
derstand the nature of light, or the laws of 
light, by the study of things which light 
enables us to see. If all knowledge is but 
the sum of the impressions which the ex- 
ternal world has made on the mind, then 
the cause of knowledge is matter, and 
knowledge is but the image or reflection 
of material things. Knowledge, then, 
would sustain the same relation to the out- 
side world, that the shadow of a tree does 
to the tree. One would come as near 
lifting up the tree by its own shadow as 
lifting up the truth by Locke's system of 
sensational philosophy. 

Impressions are simple, atomic. They 
come into the mind, one after another. 
They cohere in no unity. They are held 
together by no necessary relation. They 



no TRUTH. 

are separate, one from the other. If there 
is no primary, innate faculty ; no abiding 
and indwelling mental activity, that lies 
behind, and determines and co-ordinates 
the objects which nature supplies through 
the senses, converting them into rational, 
orderly knowledge, then we can never get 
hold of truth. We are shut up to hope- 
less ignorance. 

IV. 

Berkeley, in order to escape the material- 
ism to which Locke's philosophy led, 
accepted his theory of knowledge, but de- 
stroyed his outward, material world. In 
his view, there was no matter, nothing but 
ideas. The impressions conveyed through 
the senses into our minds are but reflec- 
tions of the ideas of God. 

In Hume, the empirical theory of know- 
ing found a disciple who did not hesitate 
to affirm all that w^as involved in it. 



TRUTH. 171 



Locke said there was au outward world, 
and knowledge was its image. Berkeley 
said tkere was no material world ; that 
knowledge was the reflection of God's ideas. 
Hume said there was neither outer world 
nor inner ; that there was nothing but im- 
pressions, sensations, ideas, in perpetual flow 
and flux. He claimed that all ideas which 
could not be resolved into impressions 
were false. He declared we could have no 
ideas of substance, because, if perceived by 
the eye, it must be a color ; if by the ear, a 
sound ; if by the palate, a taste. And be- 
cause we could not think of substance as a 
color or a sound or a taste, we could there- 
fore have no idea of it whatever. Belief 
in a permanent external world was ren- 
dered irrational by his theory of knowl- 
edge. ISothing is more vital and irre- 
pressible than belief in one's own exist- 
ence, but even this could not be retained 
in accordance with the teachings of 



172 TBTITH. 

Hume's philosopliy. "Whence," says he, 
" could the impression of the idea of self 
be derived? What impression could 
create this idea ? This question it is im- 
possible to answer without a manifest con- 
tradiction and absurdity, and yet it is a 
question that must necessarily be answered. 
For my part, when I enter most inti- 
mately into what I call myself, I always 
stumble upon some perception or other ; 
heat or cold, light or shade, pain or 
pleasure. I cannot catch myself at any 
time ivithout a perception, or observe any- 
thing but a perception. When my per- 
ceptions are removed at any time, as by 
sound sleep, so long am I insensible of my- 
self, and may be said truly not to exist." 

The sensational philosophy which prom- 
ised so much, which appeared so eminently 
practical, that took to itseK such an air of 
common sense as it got about obliterating 
innate ideas, was seen at length to be 



TRUT3. ITS 

utterly impotent. It corresponded witli 
absolutely nothing in heaven or in earth. 
The very impressions it admitted, passed 
through it like drops of water out of a 
fisherman's net. Where the impressions 
came from or where they went to, it fur- 
nished no means of knowing. God and 
world and cause and law and self might 
be, but the human mind could never know 
whether they were or not. The human 
observer stood before a procession of 
images, sensations, perceptions going by 
like an unending circus troupe. 

In Hume may be traced the entire break- 
down of empirical philosophy as a method 
for getting at the truth. He recognized 
this himself. "When I turn my eye in- 
ward," he says, " I find nothing but doubt 
and ignorance." " The understanding, when 
it acts alone, and according to its most 
general principles, entirely subverts itself, 
and leaves not the lowest degree of evi- 



174 TBXTTB. 



dence in any proposition, eitlier in phil- 
osophy or common life." " We have, there- 
fore, no choice left, but betwixt a false 
reason and none at all." 

yii. 

The most remarkable tiling in the whole 
search for truth, is that anybody after 
Hume should have attempted to find it 
with Hume's principles. Yet the two best 
known writers who have lived in England 
since Hume's day, have rested their dog- 
matic doctrines on the foundations laid by 
the sensational philosophers. Hume's im- 
pressions and ideas became John Stuart 
Mill's permanent possibilities of sensation 
and feeling, and Herbert Spencer's vivid 
and faint manifestations of the unknow- 
able. In our time Herbert Spencer has 
undertaken the herculean task of explain- 
ing matter and mind, time and space, 
society and morals ; of showing what they 



mUTK 175 

are and what they are not, by the same 
principles which Hnme himself demon- 
strated to be incapable of explaining any- 
thing. Spencer's nnits of knowledge are 
vivid and faint manifestations of the Un- 
known. How the nnknowable remains 
unknown, after vividly and faintly mani- 
festing itself, we are not told. Mr. 
Spencer's vivid and faint manifestations of 
the unknown are old aquaintances with 
new names. 

Locke knew them as impressions and 
sensations. Berkeley recognized them as 
ideas of sense and imagination. John 
Stuart Mill was on speaking terms with 
them as permanent possibilities of sensa- 
tion and feeling. Mr. Spencer gives them 
another baptism and another name. He 
calls them vivid and faint manifestations 
of the unknowable. While they have been 
changed in name, however, it must not be 
supposed that they have undergone any 



11Q TMUTK 



cliange in nature or character. They stand 
apart, the one from the other, just the same 
as ever. They are just as foreign to the 
mind, where they vividly and faintly mani- 
fest themselves, as were the impressions of 
John Locke. They flare and flicker, ]'ise 
and fall, like the jack-o'-lantern lights of 
legend and tale. One light is not of a piece 
Avith any other light. The lights follow 
one another in such quick succession, first 
vivid, then faint, that one cannot tell from 
the momentary flames and flashes what is 
intended to be advertised. That something 
is trying, by various pyrotechnic displays, 
to get itself revealed seems to be evident. 
But there is such hurry on the part of the 
something that makes the manifestations, 
such a disorderly whirl and changing of 
lights, that the observer is totally beml- 
dered ; and, being under the necessity of 
making some account to himself as to their 
meaning, concludes that they are vivid and 



i 



TRUTH. 177 



faint illuminations of the unknowable. 
Hume's procession of sensations and ideas 
has by Spencer been converted into the 
fire-works of the unknowable. With 
Hume's physiological theory, the mind 
could know nothing but its own sensations. 
Spencer's vivid and faint manifestations of 
the unknowable are equally as incapable 
of furnishing any rational basis for belief 
in mind or matter, law or cause, self or God. 
To ask the human mind to believe the en- 
cyclopedic, dogmatic system of philosophy 
he addressed to it, after insisting that all 
our knowledge is but the sum of vivid and 
faint manifestations of the unknowable, is 
as irrational as trying to build a cathedral 
on a London fog bank. Underneath every 
one of Spencer's general terms, the inde- 
structibility of matter, the continuity of 
motion, the persistence of force, there is 
nothing but sensations, vivid or faint mani- 
festations of the unknown. 



178 TRtlTH. 

"The doctrine of the indestructibility of 
matter/' lie says, " has now become a com- 
monplace." " Matter never either comes 
into existence, or ceases to exist." How 
are w^e to know this, with minds incapable 
of any other knowledge except such as is 
made up of vivid and faint manifestations 
of the unknown ? Who ever had a sensa- 
tion or a manifestation of the indestructi- 
bility of matter ? This is an idea involv- 
ing all past time and all future time, and 
all the laws and forces by which matter is 
regulated and conserved. How could an 
image of the indestructibility of matter be 
photographed on the sensitive plate of the 
mind ? To do this it would be necessary 
to compress all j^ast time and all future 
time into one moment, and all matter into 
one single square inch or square yard of 
space, so that the impression of it could be 
made. To believe in the indestructibility 
of matter, with Mr. Spencer's theory of the 



TRUTH. IVO 

mind's capacity to knoAV, is delirium and 
insanity. It is to believe in something 
that the mind, by its very nature, cannot 
even get an impression of. It is believing 
that the ocean can be carried in a thimble 
without any bottom. Any man who should 
utter this publicly, and sincerely, would be 
put in the insane asylum. He says again, 
" the very nature of the intelligence nega- 
tives the supposition that motion can be 
conceived (much less known) either to 
commence or to cease." The nature of the 
intelligence is such that all the knowledge 
it possesses is made up of sensations and 
manifestations of the unknown. How can 
the continuity of motion be conceived ? To 
do this, we must have a conception of all 
past time and all future time. It is an 
idea as transcendent as the idea of God. 

Mr. Spencer claims that the power the 
universe manifests to us is utterly inscru- 
table; that space and time are wholly 



180 TRUTB. 

incomprehensible; tliat matter, in its ulti 
mate nature, is as absolutely incomprehen- 
sible as space and time ; that all efforts to 
understand the essential nature of motion 
do but bring us to alternative absurdities 
of thought ; that it is impossible to form 
any idea of force in itself, and equally 
impossible to comprehend either its mode 
of exercise or its law of variation ; that we 
are unable to believe or to conceive that 
the duration of consciousness is infinite, 
and equally unable to know it as finite, or 
to conceive it as finite ; and that the person- 
ality of which we are each conscious, and 
of which the existence is to each a fact 
beyond all others the most certain, yet is a 
thing which cannot truthfully be known 
at all : knowledge of it is forbidden by 
the very nature of thought. All this is 
perfectly consistent with his theory of 
knowledge. This is the point to which 
David Hume, his master, conducted the 



TRUTH. 181 

human mind in its searcli for trutli. But 
Spencer is not logical ; he had a theory 
of being that contradicted his theory of 
knowing. So he reasons first one way and 
then another. He says, elsewhere in his 
First Principles, that common sense asserts 
the existence of a reality; that objective 
science proves that this reality cannot be 
Avhat we think it ; that subjective science 
shows why we cannot think of it as it is, 
and yet are compelled to think of it as 
existing; and that in this assertion of a 
reality utterly inscrutable in nature, reli- 
gion finds an assertion essentially coinciding 
with her own. That we are compelled to 
regard every phenomenon as a manifes- 
tation of some power by which we are 
acted upon. That though omnipresence is 
unthinkable, yet as experience discloses no 
bounds to the diffusion of phenomena, we 
are unable to think of limits to the 
presence of this power, while the criti- 



182 TRUTH. 

cisms of science teach us that this power is 
incomprehensible. Analyzing the above 
declarations, we find that Mr. Spencer 
knows there is an ultimate reality. Then 
it has being. It acts upon us. Then it 
has the attribute of action. All phe- 
nomena are manifestations of it. Then it 
has power. All phenomena are manifes- 
tations of an inscrutable power, by which 
we are acted upon. Then it has causal 
energy. We are unable to think of limits 
to the presence of this power. Then it is 
omnipresent. So the unknowable, inscru- 
table something has being, power, activity, 
causal energy, and omnipresence. But 
how are we to grasp these universal, 
transcendental attributes of the unknow- 
able, with an intelligence incapable of 
receiving anything but simple, separate, 
unrelated, broken impressions and manifes- 
tations ? It takes as much mind to believe 
in the unknowable, with the attributes of 



TRUTE. 183 

power, activity, being, causal energy, and 
omnipresence, as to believe in a self- 
existent God, witli tlie attributes of power, 
wisdom, justice, truth, and love. 

Spencer's theory of knowing is destruc- 
tive, while his theory of being is construc- 
tive and transcendental. 

VIIL 

The intelligence, as the organ of truth, 
must be large enough to find truth and 
contain truth. No sane man would under- 
take to dig down a mountain mth a tooth- 
pick. Mr. Spencer devoted page after page 
to the discussion of cause, time, space, force, 
and ultimate reality, while holding a theory 
of knowledge that made the very thought 
of these inconceivable. The very things 
that he labeled as knowable contained a 
substrate the mind could never get at. 
Knowable things, then, could not be known 
as they were ; hence if they were known at 



184 TRUTH. 



all, must be known as tliey were not, whicli 
made the mind's knowledge error. All 
who accept Mr. Spencer's theory of knowl- 
edge are shut up to absolute ignorance or 
absolute error. If ^we are to know the truth 
of reality, of mind, of external existence, we 
must have knowing faculties up to the style 
of the truth ^^'e are to know. If we are 
to know light, we must have eyes capable 
of taking in the light, of analyzing it, and 
turning it into vision. The disposition to 
limit our poAver to know, by telling us, on 
the strength of Mansel and Hamilton and 
Kant, that all om^ knowledge is relative, is 
innocent enough when stripped of its seem- 
ing wisdom. It is true that we can know no 
more than our knowing faculties permit us. 
We cannot know more than we can know. 
We are not absolute and omniscient as to 
our capacity to know. All we can see is 
what we can see with our eyes. We can- 
not see with our fingers or wdth the back 



TRUTH. 185 



of our heads. All we can hear is what we 
can hear with our ears. We have no other 
organs with which to hear. All sounds 
that vibrate at the rate of sixteen times 
to the second up to thirty-eight thousand 
times to the second, we can hear. What- 
soever sounds vibrate at a lower rate than 
sixteen times to the second or at a higher 
rate than thirty-eight thousand times to the 
second, we cannot hear, because such sounds 
are not related to the ear. But the eye, 
being adjusted to and related to much finer 
wave lengths than the ear, can see waves 
that vibrate up as high as seven hundred 
and twenty-seven trillion times to the sec- 
ond. The eye cannot see waves shorter 
than seven hundred and twenty-seven 
trillion vibrations to the second, because 
such waves are not adjusted to the eye. 
The waves the ear cannot hear are not 
sound waves. The waves the eye cannot 
see are not light waves. There are no 



186 TRUTH. 



sound waves in tlie universe tlie ear cannot 
hear, provided they are near enough to come 
into contact with it. There are no light 
waves in the universe that the eye cannot 
turn into vision, if they strike the retina. 
Are we going to fall out with the eye, and 
discredit the beauty it does see, because it 
is not as large as the rim of immensity, and 
cannot see everything disclosed by the light 
of suns and stars at once ? Are we to hold 
the ear in contempt after it takes in the 
harmonies of Beethoven and Mozart, be- 
cause it cannot hear all the music the stars 
are making as they move through the 
heavens ? 

Whatever is real and true the mind can 
know, because the mind is correlated to 
the real and the true. It cannot know 
what is unreal and untrue. It cannot 
know that two and two make five, because 
that is unreal and untrue. It cannot know 
that a crooked line is the shortest distance 



j 

i 



TRUTH. 187 



between two points, because that is un- 
knowable. It cannot know that it is more 
rational to tell a lie tlian to tell tlie truth, 
because that is unknow^able and untrue. 
There is much that is unknowable, but 
whatever is, we may be sure is irrational 
and unreal. Whatever is true in being, 
cause, time, space, mind, matter, force, mo- 
tion may be known. The finite mind can- 
not know it at once, and can never, 
throughout all infinite time, directly take it 
into the intelligence ; but it is knowable, 
because the underlying, fundamental, prior 
thing in the universe is mind, the mind 
of the absolute and eternal One. All 
things are set in order and reason. The 
external universe is the expression of mind, 
and is therefore intelligible. The human 
intelligence is the expression of the same 
mind, and is therefore capable of grasping 
and turning into thought the intelligible 
order without. 



188 TRUTH. 



According to the theory of Locke, Berke- 
ley, Hume, Mill, and Spencer, any knowl- 
edge whatsoever is impossible. If the 
knowing subject and the knowable object, 
the two factors of knowledge, can only 
come together in a mechanical way, as 
basket and potatoes, kettle and water, 
paper and letters, then the very conditions 
of knowledge are denied, and we are shut 
up to blank, square ignorance. 

Things come together to form knowl- 
edge, as things come together to form a 
tree, and not as house, calico, pins, lace, 
shoes, and blankets come together to form 
a store. An acorn is a living something. 
It is not a tree, but within itself are the 
germs of a tree. When grown, it may be 
said to have forms, as root, trunk, and 
branches. These were potentially and 
ideally contained in the acorn. But their 
realization and active expression involved 
a process, in which the ideal forms, tenden- 



TRUTB. 189 

cies, and forces contained in germ in the 
acorn met and united with the elements of 
the outside world. Suppose we consider 
the acorn the subject, and the particles in 
soil and rain and atmosphere capable of 
making a tree as the object. What hap- 
pens when an oak with all its beauty 
stands out upon the hillside ? This, sub- 
ject and object have come together in 
unity, in an organism. Suppose Locke 
should have undertaken the work of un- 
derstauding how a tree came to be, instead 
of how knowledge came to be. We will 
say he began by analyzing a full grown 
tree. Aftei^ thorough examination of its 
contents, he finds that all the parts of the 
tree, carbon, water, etc., are found outside 
of it in the external world. 

He finds that the tree is composed of 
various atoms, all of which may be found 
in the soil and in the atmosphere. He 
concludes, then, that these atoms from soil 



190 TRUTH. 



and atmosphere, began to move up to and 
down to the acorn. The acorn, passive 
meanwhile, lets them fall on it. So, of 
their o^vn free will and accord, the atoms 
kept piling themselves upon the acorn, un- 
til in the process of a hundred years there 
was a tree. Now a brick column might be 
carried up after this fashion, but not a tree. 
The prior and fundamental thing in an oak 
tree is the acorn. It contains an active, 
organizing life principle. Falling into the 
soil, this folded life power begins to stir. 
It lays hold upon the elements about it, 
digests them, assimilates them, and turns 
them into an oak. The mind is to the raw 
material of knowledge, what the acorn is 
to the raw material of oak. Through the 
senses the raw material is conveyed into the 
mind. It is then appropriated, assimilated, 
digested, and turned into knowledge. The 
active, organizing, combining power that 
turns the raw material presented by the 



TRUTH. 191 



senses into knowledge, does not come from 
the outside world. It is constitutional, fun- 
damental, original. Just as the organic 
forces of the plant take up the elements 
from the outside environment upon which 
it subsists, so the synthesizing, living power 
of the mind takes the matter of sensation 
and turns it into the whole called knowl- 
edge. Knowledge is a unifying process. 
It combines the manifold into one. It re- 
duces multiplicity to unity. All that is 
real and all that is true in the heavens 
above or in the earth below, in mind or in 
matter, in time or in space, in man or in ex- 
ternal world, are capable of being reduced 
to unity in knowledge. 

Knowledge is the subjective unity in the 
finite mind that corresponds to the objec- 
tive unity that lies within the infinite mind. 
Nothing less than a universal synthesis 
satisfies the finite mind, because it is a 
copy of the infinite mind. The finite self- 



192 TRUTH. 

consciousness is a copy of tlie infinite self- 
consciousness. Tlie infinite mind knows 
all things at once; tlie finite mind comes to 
knowledge througli a gradual process. It 
can never, through all eternity, know all 
the infinite mind knows, but it can eter- 
nally advance in knowledge, and comfort 
itself at every stage of the process with the 
thought that nothing in the mind of the 
infinite and absolute one is foreign to it, or 
in contradiction with its capacity to know. 
In thinking, the finite mind is at home in 
its father's realm, and because this realm 
stretches out illimitably every way should 
not oppress us or discourage us. For this 
the finite mind can know, that throughout 
the limitless domain of God there is order 
and truth and reality. 

Thus standing face to face with truth, 
and being endowed with intellectual capac- 
ities capable of recognizing it, grasping it, 
in its unity and in its pai-ticulars, it is 



TRUTH. 193 



proper to inquire the object and the pur- 
pose of it. It is the revelation which the 
infinite mind has made to the finite. It is 
the lansfuao-e of God, in which he has em- 
bodied his thought. It is the word of the 
universal spirit. Man is a spirit, and he is 
to grow and come to the full realization of 
himself by partaking of the word of God. 
Truth has been revealed for no other pur- 
pose than to make men. Sir William Ham- 
ilton represents truth as game, and the 
method of getting truth to a chase. He says 
the exercise of our powers involved in the 
process of getting truth is better than the 
game we seek. Lessings says, " If the Al- 
mighty, holding in one hand truth, and in 
the other search after truth, presented them 
to me and asked me which I would choose, 
with all humility, but without hesitation, I 
should say, give me search after truth." 

Mallbranche says : "If I held truth cap- 
tive, like a bird in my hand, I would let it 



194 mUTH. 

go again, that I miglit cliase and capture 
it." Miiller says : " Trutli is tlie property 
of God alone. Searcli after truth belongs 
toman." Such sentiments indicate that 
the men who uttered them had no correct 
idea of the I'eal nature of truth, or of man's 
intellectual nature, the necessary food of 
which is truth. It is true that the search 
after truth gives exercise and pleasure to 
the intellectual faculties, as search after 
bread gives exercise and health to the 
physical powers. But an eternal search 
for bread is not sufficient to keej) man's 
body robust and strong. The very condi- 
tion upon which he will be able to keep 
up the search for it is, that he regularly and 
steadily partake of it. A tree, had it in- 
telligence and emotion, would, doubtless, 
enjoy wrestling with the storms, and throw- 
ing its roots into the earth and its branches 
into the heavens, making levies upon earth 
and sky for its own nourishment ; but if it 



TRUTH 195 

did not constantly turn tlie elements it 
found into its trunk and branches, it would 
not be able to wrestle long witli the 
storms, or foi'age long upon the earth and 
sky. 

To claim that the intellectual faculties 
are always to search for truth, and that the 
search is better than the truth, is tacitly to 
assume that truth is not for them ; or, if for 
them, and should ever be found, would be 
as useless as a poor, tired, half -dead fox 
overtaken by the hunters in the chase. 
Searching for truth is doing ; partaking of 
truth is being. The search gives agility 
and skill ; the partaking of truth gives 
wealth of character. To hunt game with 
no other object than that which comes from 
the sport of the chase is degrading. To 
shoot birds only for the purpose of seeing 
them fall is mean and wicked. So, to 
search for truth with no other purpose than 
that which comes from the exercise of the 



196 TRUTH. 



search, is unwortliy tlie intellect that was 
given, not only to find truth, but to grow 
rich and God-like by partaking of the truth. 
Man's need for bread, we saw, led to the 
establishment of commerce, and commerce 
did far more than secure to man food and 
clothing and shelter. It brought men to- 
gether and discovered themselves to them- 
selves. Power lent itself to the uses of 
man's social nature, aAvakened and de- 
veloped by commerce, and made it possible 
for men to come into relations with one 
another, not simply in states and nations, 
but on all the earth. The need for bread 
helped to the formation of society, the 
nature of power and the applications to 
which it lent itself widened the social do- 
main into a universal brotherhood, to which 
man, as a spirit, was correlated. But many 
saw bread only in its relations to hunger, 
and power only in its relations to wealth 
and worldly dominion. So, many see in 



TRUTH. 197 



truth no purpose except the practical and 
material ends to which it can be put. In 
the esteem of the utilitarians, it was well 
enough that learned men consecrated their 
genius and their industry to the study of 
the subtle subject of heat. It was well 
that they discovered the real nature of heat, 
and saw that it was not caloric, but a mode 
of motion. Because this opened the way 
for our railroads and steamboats and quick 
methods of transj^ortation, which have con- 
tributed so much to the world's wealth. 
It was well that the impracticable and 
theoretical men, who had nothing better to 
do, spent ages studying the nature of elec- 
tricity, and finally discovered that there 
were certain metals for which it had affin- 
ity, and that it had speed equal to thought 
itself. For these studies have enabled the 
practical and substantial men to order their 
corn and meat by telegraph, and the prac- 
tical housewives to order their roast beef 



198 TRUTH. 



by telephone. It is well that people who 
had no practical turn of mind spent years 
in considering the structure of the human 
frame, and the plants and minerals capable 
of ministering to it, for in this way the 
doctors have got ideas by which they are 
enabled to keep us practical men alive, so 
that we can trade longer, and build more 
factories and eat more victuals. 

Now it is true that the knowledge the 
intelligence comes to by insight into the 
relations and nature and truth of things, 
can be turned to practical account. But 
the truth the mind hnds by study was not 
primarily intended to open the way for 
steam cars and telegraphs and the produc- 
tion of wealth. These things are inci- 
dental. Truth is the provision God has 
made for the intellect. The knowledge 
of the stars has helped man to sail the sea 
and to take his bearings on any part of its 
surface. But the practical account to 



TRUTH. 



whicli this knowledge has been turned is 
not to be compared, in value, to the effect 
it was intended to have on the human 
mind, strengthening it, ennobling it, and 
harmonizing it with the divine mind. 



BIGHTEO USNE88. 



"While smitten with the fatal wanness of ap- 
proaching doom, the flamboyant pleiad of the men of 
violence descends the steep slope to the gulf of de- 
vouring time : lo ! at the other extremity of space, 
when the last cloud has but now faded in the deep 
sky of the future, azure forevermoi*e, rises resplendent 
the sacred galaxy of the true stars — Orpheus, Hermes, 
Job, Homer, ^schylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hippocrates, 
Phidias, Socrates, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Archi- 
medes, Euclid, Pythagoras, Lucretius, Plautus, Ju- 
venal, Tacitus, Saint Paul, John of Patmos, Tertullian, 
Pelagius, Dante, Gutenberg, Joan of Arc, Christopher 
Columbus, Luther, Michael Augelo, Copernicus, 
Galileo, Rabelais, Calderon, Cervantes, Shakspere, 
Rembrandt, Kepler, Milton, Moli^re, Newton, Des- 
cartes, Kant, Piranesi, Beccari, Diderot, Beethoven, 
Fulton, Montgolfier, Washington : and the marvel- 
ous constellations, brighter from moment to moment, 
radiant as a tiara of celestial diamonds, shine in the 
clear horizon, and, as it rises, blends, with the bound- 
less dawn of Jesus Christ." 



CHAPTEK IV. 

THE PROVISIOIS- FOR THE MORAL NATURE OF 

MAIN-. 

Two elements are essential to tlie pro- 
cess of thinking, the intellect and the 
truth. One is within, the other is with- 
out. The one is subjective, the other is 
objective. Two elements are also essential 
to the process of volition, the will and the 
right. The one within, the other with- 
out. The one subjective, the other objec- 
tive. Before sight is possible, there must 
be an eye and there must be light. The 
one is within, the other is without. The 
one is subjective, the other is objective. 
Before hearing, there must be an ear and 
there must be sound. The one is within, 
the other is without. The one is subjec- 

m 



204 BIGHTE0U8NE88. 

tive, the other is objective. Before breath- 
ing there must be lungs and there must be 
atmosphere. The one is within, the other 
is without. The one is subjective, the 
other is objective. 

No definition of man is large enough to 
accommodate the facts of his nature, that 
does not embrace what he is without as 
well as Avhat he is within, what he is ob- 
jectively as well as what he is subjectively. 
It must not only embrace the intellect, but 
the truth which it thinks ; not only the 
will, but the right which corresponds to it ; 
not only the eye, but the light which 
gives it meaning ; not only the ear, but the 
sound which matches it; not only the 
lungs, but the atmosphere to which they 
are correlated. Human nature is dually 
constituted, so that the larger half of itself 
is outside of itself. 

Illustrations of the same duality of con- 
stitution may be found on a limited scale 



niGHTEOnSNESS. 205 

in tlie organic and in tlie inorganic worlds. 
The greater half of the oak is not in the 
life germ of the acom, but in the elements 
of the soil and the sky which environ it. 
The larger paii: of the fish is in the ocean 
which surrounds it. Most of the fuel 
which makes the heat in the grate is not 
in the carbon of the coal, but in the 
oxygen of the air which fills the room. 

I. 

The possession of a will and the ca- 
pacity for choice make man a moral being. 
Man's will is bounded on every side by 
the laws of God. These laws are only 
another name for God's will. Man is 
made in God's image and has a will, as far 
as it goes, just like God's will. 

By choosing to act and to move along 
the lines of law which gather from every 
whither about his will, he finds he can go 
somewhere, that he can leave the narrow, 



206 BIGHTEOUSNESS. 

provincial, and local neighborliood of ease 
and sense and subjection, and find his life 
in tliat broad realm of freedom, tlaat be- 
longs to him as a thinking and willing 
being. 

At the termini of some railroads there 
are huge contrivances called turntables. 
They are constructed of immense timbers 
and balanced on pivots. They are large 
enough to accommodate the full length of 
a steam engine. Iron rails are laid across 
these tables, of the same size and the same 
distance apart as the rails which make up 
the lines of the main track. When the 
train comes in from the far interior, the 
engine is run out on one of these tables 
and turned round, so that the headlight 
faces the main track again. Before the 
engine is ready to leave the short track, 
however, the rails on the turntable must 
exactly correspond to the rails on the 
main road. Then the engineer pulls the 



RIGHTEOUSNESS. 20*7 

throttle, and tlie great locomotive rolls 
past tlie circumference of its pivoted and 
temporary resting place into commerce 
witli tlie railways of the globe. Imag- 
ine railway lines coming together about 
such a revolving table from all the earth, 
so that an engine could pass from this 
circular platform toward any quarter of 
the globe, the only condition being that 
the short track on the table correspond 
to the rails of the long track on which it 
was proposed for the engine to run, and 
you have an illustration, which in some de- 
gree helps us to understand the relation of 
man's will to the laws of God. 

Should the engineer undertake to get 
the engine from the table without refer- 
ence to the lines upon which it was in- 
tended to run, we know very well what 
the consequences would be. He would 
not go far, and even the little distance he 
should manage to make would be attended 



208 RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

with tremendous bumping and friction. 
All movement would be in tlie direction 
of cbaos and confusion. However great 
the expenditure of energy, no point would 
be reached, and the end of the undertak- 
ing would be waste and failure. If, on the 
other hand, we should imagine an engine 
on such a revolving plane, capable of mak- 
ing fifty miles an hour, with no tracks 
leaving it, we know it could not go any- 
where, and besides there would be no rea- 
son for its being. It would be without 
meaning. Before the distance between 
one point and another can be passed by a 
train, two things are necessary, an engine 
and a railroad. The one may be called 
subjective, the other objective. The one 
implies the other. They are the necessary 
elements of transportation. As long as the 
train keeps to the iron rails laid for it, it 
moves without friction. It is only when 
the subjective element jumps the track 



RIGBTEOVSNESS. ^09 

and essays to determine its own objective 
direction, tliat trouble comes. Then it is 
that cars are ditched and people killed or 
crippled. The laws of God run to and fro 
throughout the whole earth. They cross 
and recross every realm. They pass 
through every domain, physical, mental, 
and moral. They go straight through 
matter and straight through mind. They 
lead under the sea and over the sea and 
through the sea. ,Down through the earth 
and up through the air they may be noted, 
embracing witli their invisible tracks every 
square inch of soil and sky. They insure 
the order of the universe, visible and invisi- 
ble, tangible and intangible. They reach 
from globe to globe and make possible the 
commerce of the spheres. They run out 
into the infinitely great and back into the 
infinitely small, and bind in unity the 
atoms and the stars. 

When man, by the aid of his reason, 



^10 RI0HTE0USNES8. 

discovers the trutli of things, which is the 
provision for his intellect, these laws ap- 
pear as provision for his will. 

So truth and law, reality and righteous- 
ness, expressions of the thought and will 
of God, are the everlasting facts to which 
man is to adjust his intellect and will, if 
he is to cross the oceans, travel the conti- 
nents, and claim the possessions which in 
the universe belong to him. If he mis- 
reads the facts, he will of course misread 
the la^vs which govern the facts, and will 
thus be unable to get facts or laws to serve 
him. But clearly seeing the truth of 
things, he is able to avail himself of the 
laws of things. As long as he only saw 
things in the lump, and looked upon the 
world as so much air and earth and fire 
and water, he missed the subtle laws 
which regulate the atomic and molecular 
structure of bodies, and failed to make 
them his servants. When, by the aid of 



RIGHTEOUSNESS. 211 

observation and experiment, lie reduced 
the earth to its ultimate particles and came 
to such knowledge of it as corresponded to 
the facts of it ; when he came to see the 
laws and drift of things, the tendencies 
and affinities of things ; he had only to put 
the productions of his will in line with the 
way things were going, to have them 
serve him. Seeing that forces have power 
to do work in proportion to their energy 
of position, and applying this insight to 
the river with forty feet fall, he builds his 
mill beside it and thus utilizes it to grind 
his wheat. Seeing what soil and sunlight 
and rain can do when they combine to un- 
wrap the life in a seed, he commits his 
wheat to their benevolent tendencies and 
gets a harvest of twenty bushels for every, 
one he seems to lose. He studies fire. 
He sees it wrap in flame and level in 
an hour fortunes it took a lifetime to ac- 
cumulate. He learns what a furious and 



212 mOHTE0U8NE8&. 

awful force it is. He gets insight into its 
real nature. He gets knowledge of it that 
corresponds to the reality of it. He sees 
that it is only a flaming and lurid method 
of movement. With the truth of it he 
gets the law of it. So by the aid of voli- 
tion, put forth in accordance with intelli- 
gence, he contrives a machine correspond- 
ing to the laws of heat, as a mode of mo- 
tion. In this way he utilizes the heat that 
burned up his cities, to transport him in 
ease and comfort over the country. He 
studies the stars nntil his knowledge of 
them corresponds to them as they are ; 
along with this knowledge, he comes to an 
understanding of their laws, their uniform 
methods of action. Then he builds his 
great ships and commits them to the wild 
and storm-tossed sea, sure that his power 
to guide them will never fail as long as 
law and order remain in the heavens. 
That there is a natural order, with cer- 



RIGHTEOUSNESS 213 

tain inlieriiig laws, men readily accept. 
That this order has the consistency of being 
developed in one way ; that there is a dip 
to things that must be followed ; that there 
is a clew, in accordance with which things 
may be worked ; that there is a trend, drift, 
and law of things that must be accepted 
and followed ; all this, men readily assent 
to. They do not attempt to farm the Sa- 
hara Desert, for they know the conditions 
of harvests are not there. They do not 
put out orange groves in Minnesota, nor 
plant cotton in Canada, nor sow rice in 
British Columbia. They do not expect 
the soil that spews up the ice to produce 
watermelons at the same time. They do 
not pretend to navigate ships over the con- 
tinents, and to lay their railway lines on 
the surface of the sea. They ^x their tele- 
graph wires to poles by means of little 
glass contrivances, and never attempt to 
send electricity through the grape vine. 



214 BIGHTEOUSNESS. 

Natural laws they know inhere in the facts 
of nature, and are not read into earth and 
rock and river and atmosphere. They 
know that necessary laws reside in the 
facts of condition, and that they must study 
these laws to know^ the line of practical 
work they require. In bailding a house of 
stone they know it is necessary to defer to 
the law of gravity, that this law cannot be 
ignored or set aside, so they carry up the 
edifice in such conformity to rule and line 
as that the center of gravity falls in a line 
inside the base. They might prefer a house 
built with reference to a different order of 
things, one in which the center of gravity 
would fall in a line outside the base. But 
it is very ^vell understood among men that 
the law of gravity must be respected. Even 
anarchists and nihilists, who seem to have 
irrepressible antipathy for all ancient or- 
ders and laws and establishments, do con- 
descend sufficiently to respect the time- 



RIGHTEO U8NES8. 2 1 5 

honored, even if slightly belated, laws of 
gravity. 

II. 

The time was when men accepted the 
existence of a moi'al order wdth the same 
implicit, unquestioned confidence, that all 
men to-day accept the existence of a natu- 
ral order. In Homer's Themistes we have 
an illustration of this confidence. The 
very word by which the decision of a judge 
is described attributes it to Themis, the in- 
visible embodiment of justice. Thus the 
judge is but the channel through which the 
decision passes from the unseen moral order 
into the Greek coui't of justice. The judge 
is not respected because he has authority 
to make the decision, but because his voca- 
tion makes him the vehicle through which 
the decision of a higher power is rendered. 
Moses said to the people of Israel, " Thou 
Shalt not lie," "Thou shalt not steal," 
"Thou shalt not commit adultery," but 



216 BIGHTEOUSNESS. 

these were not his words simply, but the 
words through which a moral order was 
interpreted. The solemn and awful import 
given to these commands did not arise 
from the vehicle through which they 
passed into the Hebrew social order, but 
from the fact that they inhered in the very 
constitution of man as a social being, and 
when they were uttered, they were felt to 
come from the God who fashioned man's 
life and set him in communities and states. 
They had the same sort of authority in the 
moral realm that the declarations of New- 
ton, concerning the power of gravity, had 
in the natural. Newton did not conceive 
in his OAvn brain the laws of gravity, he 
saw them and formulated them. Nor did 
Moses create the Ten Commandments, he 
saw them and interpreted them. The laws 
of gravity were transcripts from the will of 
God concerning matter, the Ten Command- 
ments were transcripts from the will of 



RIGHTEOUSNESS. 217 

God concerning men. When natural 
bodies come together, it would be found 
that they always attracted each other in 
proportion to their mass and inversely as 
the squares of their distance. When men 
come together, it would always be found, 
that if they w^ere to live together in har- 
mony and health; if they were to advance 
and get above the planes of the brutes and 
the savages ; they must abstain from lying, 
and stealing, and adultery, and thus be 
truthful, and honest, and virtuous. 

The laws of gravity were not arbitrary 
rules, ordained to oppress suns and systems 
without rhyme or reason. Order of some 
sort had to be preserved among the 
millions of blazing, rolling worlds. Nor 
were the Ten Commandments arbitrary 
lines of conduct imposed upon men at the 
pleasure of a great, omnipotent tyrant. 
Men could not live apart, out of touch 
and contact with one another. Thus liv- 



218 RIGHTEOUSNESS. 



ing, they were lower tliau tlie beasts that 
perish. They could not live together 
without rules of some sort to regulate 
their lives. And laws which looked to 
the preservation of truthfulness, honesty, 
and virtue, were thought better than laws 
which looked to the production of lying, 
dishonesty, and adultery. 

Because of the impetus given to the 
studies of material science within recent 
years, by the discoveries of scholars, the 
attention of men has been directed to the 
objects of the natural world and the laws 
which regulate them. Discoveries into 
the nature of heat, light, etc., has had the 
same effect upon the human mind that the 
discoveries of the gold fields in the West 
had upon the people of America in the 
early days. People abandoned fields and 
shops and stores and went in search for 
gold. The attention of the civilized world 
has in this o'eneration been directed to the 



RIGHTEOUSNESS. 219 

consideration of out\vard facts. There 
has been promise here of earthly fortune. 
Conviction as to the existence of a moral 
order with its rewards and penalties is not 
so deep and abiding as it once was among 
English speaking people. But it is well 
to remember that the moral laws of the 
universe have not in the meantime been 
suspended, because men have not seen 
proper to consider them and to act with 
reference to them. They are just as real 
and as unfailing as ever. When accepted 
and followed, their presence is seen in 
health, in political stabilit}^, in intellectual 
progress. When ignored and forgotten, 
theii' presence is seen in disease, in politi- 
cal corruption, in mental stupidity, in 
sham and emptiness. In one way or an- 
other they always manage to get in their 
w^ork. They never sleej), they never tire, 
they are eternally present to bless or to 
curse, to lift up or to cast down. They 



220 RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

get round to every man's home, and sooner 
or later to every man's life, bearing honor 
or dishonor, legitimate reward or righteous 
infamy. They are not to be bribed, white- 
washed, or bulldozed ; they come clean, un- 
varnished, and unveneered to posit their 
labels on every man's character ; and what- 
ever is read on the label, absolutely defines 
the content. Irrespective of money, titles, 
place, or rank, they come. The president 
in his seat, the judge on his bench, the 
preacher in his pulpit, cannot escape. If 
the president gets labeled pigmy, pigmy 
he is. If the judge gets classified fraud, 
fraud he is. If the preacher gets down as 
trimmer and sham, trimmer and sham 
he is. 

III. 

How are we to find moral laws ? Just as 
we find natural laws. When we find the 
truth of natural bodies, reason sees the laws 
which inhere in them, and prudence die- 



BIQHTEOUSNESS. 221 

tates such action on our part as these laws 
require. When ^ve come to truth, on the 
moral plane, or to such knowledge of the 
facts as corresponds to the truth, reason, 
unless perverted, sees the laws that reside 
in them, and conscience dictates that these 
laws should be obeyed. Conscience un- 
erringly and infallibly approves the right. 
B}" the aid of the light which is thrown up- 
on it when the intellect comes into relations 
of knowledge mth moral truth, it recog- 
nizes the laws the will ought to follow. 
These laws make up a part of the truth. 
Before the right can be recognized, the truth 
must be seen. When that which the intel- 
ligence takes for truth is not the truth, the 
conscience will recognize laws for the will 
to follow that do not correspond to the laws 
of God. It has often happened that what 
the intelligence took for truth did not corre- 
spond to objective reality, and hence was 
not the truth : hence the conscience has often 



222 RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

approved and suggested lines of action tliat 
were at variance witli that wliicli was essen- 
tially and eternally right. Those who fol- 
lowed the dictates of conscience, however, 
under such conditions, did, under the cir- 
cumstances, light. To have refused to fol- 
low conscience would have increased their 
confusion. A man in the liog, with the cer- 
tainty of death before him, ought to follow 
the guide that appears, even though he 
should not know how to lead him out of 
the swamp. Conscience never fails to come 
as near recognizing the right as the intellect 
comes to discovering the truth. When 
that which the intellect apprehends as truth 
corresponds to objective reality, we may be 
sure that the laws which inhere in it, and 
which conscience suggests as the ones the 
will ought to follow, correspond to the laws 
of God. One's conscience may lead him 
wi^ong, but onl}^ when the intellect has led 
him wrono^. St. Paul's conscience led him 



mOHTEOUSNESS. 223 

wrong wlien it impelled him to persecute 
the Christians of the early church, but it 
was because that which he held for truth 
did not tally with the outward facts, and 
hence was not the truth. Had the supposed 
truth which he held while persecuting the 
Christians been real truth, then in perse- 
cuting the Christians he would have done 
right. The reversal of conscience resulted 
from the incoming of new truth, or such 
knowledge as was sustained by the outward 
facts. The conscience of the Hindoo 
mother that leads her to throw her child 
into the River Ganges is as good as the con- 
science of the Christian mother that leads 
her to carry her child to the Sunday school. 
The trouble with the Hindoo mother is not 
with her conscience, but with her religious 
knowledge ; it does not correspond to the 
facts of the order of the moral and spiritual 
universe. We are to determine the value 
of the affirmations of conscience by deter- 



224 BIGHTEO TI8NE88. 

mining the value of the knowledge out of 
which those affirmations grow. Knowl- 
edge is valuable in proportion to its corre- 
spondence mth that which is real. As 
often as the intellect grasps the truth, the 
conscience will suggest the right that ac- 
companies it. There is no truth of a moral 
nature that has not its attendant right. 

IV. 

We know the moral truth as we know 
material truth, through its relations. Re- 
lation makes tlie difference between chaos 
and cosmos. To define any natural object 
is to place it in its relations. We could not 
define oxygen without naming the elements 
to which it is related. To take it out of 
relation is to take from it any meaning. 
Error is wrong relation. When the mind 
assigns a place to an object other than 
that which really belongs to it, in the order 
of which it forms a part, we call this error. 



i 



RIGHTEOUSNESS. 225 

If, seeing the parts of a house scattered over 
a field by a storm, we should confound a 
sleeper with a rafter, we should take it from 
its proper place and take away its meaning 
as a part of the building. AH of our 
knowledge is of relations and not of sen- 
sations, as Hume taught. Sensations set 
the mind to classifying and compaiing, and 
the knowledge it comes to is of relations. 
Take the sensations the mind has when a 
red object is presented to the eye. Does 
not the mind begin at once to dis- 
tinguish this sensation as one of redness 
from other sensations that are of different 
colors ? 

Is not its reality as a particular color 
constituted for us by its relation to colors, 
by its place in the scale of colors ? If there 
was but one color, and that color the one 
w^e now know as red, how could we know 
it as such ? How could we call it red unless 
to distinguish it from some other color with. 



226 m0HTE0U8NE88. 

which we, for the time being, compared it 
or contrasted it ? So true is it that reality 
is constituted for us by the sum of its rela- 
tions, that if the relations of things are main- 
tained, no increase or diminution of the quan- 
tity of things related will be detected in our 
knowledge of them. If the earth were 
compressed into a sphere no larger than a 
marble, no one could know it if the relations 
among the objects which make it up were 
the same. 

Again, the earth might be enlarged 
until it should be a billion times larger 
than what it is ; yet this could not be 
known as long as men and gates and spoons 
and saucers and houses and cuff-buttons 
wei'e enlai'ged in the same proportion. The 
leaf of a man's dining table might be ten 
miles square, and the ball of butter on his 
table as big as the Stone Mountain in 
Georgia ; yet if cook, and cat, and stove, 
and water-bucket were increased in the 



RtGETEO XfSNESS. 227 



same ratio, lie would not recognize any 
difference. 

V. 

We enter tlie world of humanity, whicli 
is the realm of morality, through the 
family. Here we open our eyes to the 
light, and here we have the first intima- 
tions of truth, which is provision for the 
intellect, and of righteousness, .which is 
provision for the will. The truth of the 
family is the sum of the relations which 
subsist among the members of it. The 
family consists, we will say, of father and 
mother, and children. Here is a man and 
a woman, then, bound together by the 
relation of marriage. The children are 
related to the parents as offspring. The 
children are related to one another as 
brothers and sisters. Altogether they are 
one and they are many. There is unity 
and there is diff'erence. In the relations 
implied in the names husband and mfe, 



228 m0HTE0TTSNE88. 

father and motlier, parents and children, 
brothers and sisters, we have the truth of 
the family. We know the family and can 
only know the family thi'ough these rela- 
tions. Take the relations away, and you 
take the family away. There cannot be a 
husband without a wife, a father ^^dthout 
a mother, parents mthout children, and 
children without a father and a mother. 
Abiding in these relations, which make up 
the truth of the family, wrapt up with 
them and o-rowino^ out of them, are the 
laws of right which the will is to obey. 
Tlie relation of marriage is accompanied 
by certain obligations and duties which 
husband and wife are to observe. These 
obligations and duties are divine laws, 
because marriage is a divine relation. The 
relations involved in the term parents, are 
attended by certain necessary laws the 
father and the mother are to observe with 
reference to children. The names of child, 



RIGHTEOUSNESS. 229 

brother, sister, imply relations tliat in turn 
imply laws the child is to follow with ref- 
erence to parents, and brothers and sisters 
are to regard with reference to one an- 
other. These laws, which grow out of 
the relations which constitute the family, 
are not arbitrary, artificial, or accidental. 
They have not been formed by the 
opinions of men, nor formulated in the 
legislative assemblies of men. Legislative 
bodies have, perhaps, confirmed them and 
reproduced them in statutes, but this Avas 
not to create, but to transcribe what was 
already present. The laws mth reference 
to which the members of a family find 
themselves placed are as essential and con- 
stitutional as the laws governing natural 
objects, w^hich we define when we say 
bodies attract each other in proportion to 
their mass and inversely as the squares of 
their distance. These are subtle and 
invisible principles which cannot be read 



230 RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

out of rocks and logs and moons and suns. 
Displace rocks and logs and suns and 
moons, and tke apparent power of these 
laws would not be seen, but upon the 
appearance of the natural objects, they 
would be immediately grasped and domi- 
nated by the power of the laws. 

AYe pass from the family into the school. 
Here again we find laws already laid for 
the wall to follow. They grow out of the 
truth, constitutive of the school, and this 
truth is made up of the relations subsisting 
among the members of the school. There 
are teachei^, whose duty it is to control 
and to instruct. There are children, 
w^hose duty it is to learn and obey. The 
school is an institution, the object of 
which is to lead young minds into a knowl- 
edge of the earth, its continents, seas, 
rivers, and mountains; into a knoAvledge 
of language, its structure, uses, and the 
meaning of its terms ; into a knowledge of 



RIQHTEO USNESS. 2 3 1 

liumanity, its races, governments, and 
religions. If children are to share in the 
benefits of the object for which the school 
is established, they must observe the laws 
which inhere in the very constitution of it. 
They must obey the teacher, they must 
study the books, they must be polite, for- 
bearing and kind to one another. It often 
happens that a child enters the school and 
refuses to follow the laws that reside in 
the structure and purpose of the school. 
He is Avillf ul and conceited, and thinks his 
own way better than the necessary and 
essential way ordained for him. He has 
the same sort of experience the engineer 
has who attempts to run his engine from 
the turntable, without reference to the 
railway lines laid for it. There is friction 
and trouble. Various methods of punish- 
ment are resorted to with the view to get 
his will to move along the lines laid for it. 
If rebuke and punishment fail, then he is 



1 



232 RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

turned out, to attempt tlie stupid and in- 
sane experiment of getting himself through 
the world without reference to the laws 
fixed for his will to obey. Of course he 
does not go far. He turns up sooner or 
later in the Jail, the hospital, the peniten- 
tiary, or the poorhouse. 

Leaving the school, we find ourselves 
citizens of the state, members of society. 
But we do not go into society like an ax- 
man in a frontier forest to clear a place for 
his house, his fence, and his field. Methods 
of conduct are already prescribed, lines of 
action are alread fixed, and the laws which 
claim our obedience are already formulated. 
Society is an organism of mutually depend- 
ent members ; the object of it is the equity 
of all, the welfare of all, and the liberty of 
all. Equity, liberty, welfare do not come 
by accident. Men cannot reach them out 
of touch and contact with one another. 
They are only possible to men living to- 



i 



RIGHTEOUSNESS. 233 

gether, and only possible in conformity with 
certain conditions, and in tlie observance of 
certain laws. These laws lie folded in the 
nature of men as social beings. They are 
fundamental, and Aristotle saw them when 
he said, " man is by nature a political 
animal." The germs of government and 
law are in the depths of every man's being, 
as the germs of the oak are in the acorn. 
Wise men, living in society, have seen the 
truth of society, made up of the relations 
subsisting among people living together. 
Accompanying these relations, and counter- 
parts of them, they have discovered the 
laws necessary to insure the equity, liberty, 
and welfare of all. These laws have been 
embodied in constitutions, enactments, and 
statutes. To carry out these laws and to 
make them prevail, certain institutions have 
been established, a body of men whose 
duty it is to execute the laws, a Judiciary, 
whose duty it is to interpret and expound 



234 RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

the laws, and a legislative body, whose 
duty it is to repeal old laws that did not 
w^ork well, and to frame new laws to meet 
the exigencies of new conditions. To pro- 
tect the rights of all, certain penalties have 
been made to accompany the violations of 
laws. To make these penalties real, and 
to inflict them upon the proper parties, 
courts and jails and penitentiaries have 
been established. 

So we see, as the acorn cannot grow 
without appropriating the elements already 
prepared for it in the soil and the sky ; and 
as the carbon cannot burn without laying 
hold of the oxygen already existing for it 
in the atmosphere of the room ; and as the 
fish cannot swim without utilizing the 
water already adjusted to its fins ; so man 
cannot fill out the possibilities of his being 
without obeying the laws he finds already 
ordained for his ^^n\\ when he comes into 
the world. These laws converge about 



RIGHTEOUSNESS. 235 

his will in the home where he first sees the 
light, and are always declucible from the 
particular relations in which, at any time, 
his moral life is placed. They are as real 
as the laws of heat and motion and gravity. 
They I'un out from the home through the 
school, and from the school through all the 
continents of the social realm. They grow 
out of the truth of the facts of the family, 
the school, and society. They are as 
fundamental, necessary, and^ divine as the 
family, the school, and society. By observ- 
ing them, man is able to turn into his 
character the tenderness of the home, the 
learning of the school, and the resources of 
society. 

VI. 

The authority of the laws which govern 
society is not found in the fact that the 
laws have been made by the will of the 
majority, or the will of the minority, or by 
the will of a king, or by the wills of any 



236 RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

or all of tlie people ; but because they are 
founded in the constitution of human na- 
ture. The basis for the constitution of 
human nature is the mind of God, who 
created man in his own image. Social laws 
have authority, then, because they are 
consonant with the nature of man, and 
have their source in the will of God. 

It is easy to show, however, from the 
records of history, that nations have often 
lived under laws imposed upon them that 
contradicted every principle of human 
nature. Men Avere accustomed once to 
find the laws of society as well as the 
laws of nature, not from the study of men, 
or from the study of the objects of nature, 
but in the depths of their own imaginations. 
In former times men met in convention 
and council and determined by resolution 
the shape of the earth and the sun's method 
of movement. They also subjected them- 
selves to the criticism of posterity by cut- 



RIGHTEO US NESS. 237 

ting the heads of the people off who did 
not agree with them. But it gradually 
dawned on the human mind that to find 
out for certain the shape of the earth it 
might be well to devote a little study to 
the earth itself. Thus it hajopened that 
in the course of events men ceased to read 
laws into God's material universe fi'om the 
boundless realms of their fancy and conceit, 
and fell upon the more rational habit of 
taking the laws that were already there. 
Herein is the difference between mediaeval 
and modern times. 

The disposition to read laws into nature, 
without reference to the facts of nature, was 
in line with the programme to read laws 
into the social realm mthout reference to 
the facts of human nature. The laws of as- 
tronomy to-day are such as have been found 
by a study of the stars. The laws of chem- 
istry are such as have been found by a study 
of the atomic structures of bodies. One 



238 BIQHTE0USNE8S. 

miglit fall out now with the celestial laws of 
Ptolemy, and head a movement to set them 
aside. But it is not rational to fall out 
with the astronomical laws of Norman 
Lockyer, for that is to buck against the 
sun, and to make faces at the stars. 
Lockyer's laws came straight to him from 
the skies, and find their value and verifi- 
cation in the close calculation of every 
steamer that sails on the wide, restless 
sea. The laws of civilized nations to-day 
are such as have been found by a study of 
the facts of human nature. To quarrel 
with them is to set one's self against the 
way man is built. It would not do to say 
that the social laws of civilized peoples 
to-day are exact transcripts from the will 
of God concerning the conduct of social 
life. Men do not now, and perhaps will 
not for a long time, read aright the facts of 
human nature. One thing is certain, how- 
ever : in the making of laws among civilized, 



mOBTEOUSNESS. 239 

republican peoples, reference is liad to the 
facts of human nature, and not to the 
fancy of those who wish to govern. It 
cannot be disputed that the right facts 
are considered from which to make de- 
ductions. This means a complete change 
of front in the modern world over the ages 
past. There are doubtless many minor 
laws on the statute books of the liberal and 
progressive nations of the earth to-day 
which are not in accordance with the 
nature of man ; but it seems that any ra- 
tional person is compelled to admit that 
the great legal trunk-lines conform to the 
essential laws of human nature. Take the 
Constitution of the United States. Some 
one has said that the apple from which 
Newton deduced the laws of gravity was 
two thousand years falling. He would 
have been nearer the truth if he had said 
six thousand years. The Constitution of 
the United States is as clearly a deduction 



240 ItlOHTEOUSNESS. 

from the facts of human nature, as were 
the laws of gravity from a study of falling 
bodies. The convention that met in 
Philadelphia to frame the Constitution of 
the United States, in 1787, was called to 
order on the top of the centuries. The 
members had such advantage of position as 
made it possible for them to look all down 
the ages. They were in a position to see 
all sides of human nature, under all forms 
of government. 

In the preamble to the Constitution, they 
specified certain objects for which, in their 
esteem, this government should be formed 
— union, domestic tranquillity, justice, 
liberty, welfare. Any government consti- 
tuted by a document like that has for the 
basis of its existence the facts of human 
nature, as really as the law of gravity has 
for the basis of its existence the facts of 
the stars 



niOHTEOUSNESS. 241 

VII. 

If it is necessary tliat man grasp the 
truth of tilings before lie can determine the 
laws of things, we cannot fail to see how 
important it is that he have a proper theory 
of knowledge. 

Man's idea of law will correspond to his 
theory of knowledge. When the French 
people accepted Locke's theory of knowing 
they immediately applied it to the laws, 
establishments, and institutions of the na- 
tion. They concluded logically, if all 
knowledge is of sensations, then there can 
be no authority for the belief in God, the 
immortality of the soul, or the divinity of 
law. These are universal and transcendent 
facts, but the mind has no capacity to know 
universal or transcendent facts. So society 
was to be dissolved into its constituent 
atoms, in order that individuals could ar- 
range their lives on a universal, go-as-you- 



242 RIGHTEOUSNESS. 



please principle. All existing la^vs and in- 
stitutions were to be obliterated. Eveiy- 
tliing tliat was up was to be put down. 
There are to-day, scattered tlirougli tlie 
civilized states of Europe and in some parts 
of the United States, men who want to 
emancipate the people from the dominion 
of all authority. All this grows out of the 
fashionable and sensational theory of knowl- 
edge taught first by John Locke and 
David Hume, and within recent years by 
John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. 
Here is the source of anarchy. There is 
not an influential anarchist in the world, 
but is one upon the basis of the physiologi- 
cal theory of knowledge. There is no ob- 
jective reality, but such as is composed of 
material atoms. These have got their ar- 
rangement and collocations without the 
agency of any great co-ordinating mind. 
They come together in pairs and clusters 
and groups, by the aid of no power but 



niQHTEOUSNESS. 243 

sucli as issues from the unknowable. A 
man is no more a criminal for killing 
people tlian is the Mississippi Eiver for 
overflowing its banks and drowning people. 
Men are mere products of nature, and their 
thoughts are only secretions of the brain. 
Laws and institutions are just the brain 
deposits of animals Ave call men, as dams 
across rivers and cells in gums are the de- 
posits of the brains of beavers and bees. 

In a document found on the person of a 
recent anarchist arrested by the authorities 
in England, it is asserted that the purpose 
of the anarchists is to put down all politi- 
cal, religious, and militaiy authority ; to 
burn all churches, palaces, soldier-barracks, 
fortresses, provisions, and to destroy all 
that has lived till now by business- work 
without contributing to it. From such 
documents we are to understand that the 
anarchists take it for granted that all laws 
and institutions among civilized peoples 



244 RIGHTEOUSNESS. 



have been imposed arbitrarily by those who 
govern upon those who are governed ; that 
the parties to be governed have as much 
riglit to ignore them as the governing 
parties had to make them ; that there is in 
tlie universe no moral order to which the 
political and social orders among men corre- 
spond ; that eveiy man has the privilege 
of setting up his own order; that every 
engineer has the right to ignore the rails 
laid for the flanges of liis ^vheels on the 
long roads leading out from the turntable, 
and the inestimable subjective liberty of 
pulling open the throttle valve and run- 
ning out into the country according to his 
own sweet will. Suppose all the anarch- 
ists in the world should be sent to some 
great island so that they could test their 
own theories, would they not be under the 
necessity of founding some sort of a govern- 
ment? They would have to construct 
roads, devise ways and means for lights, 



RIQHTEO USNE88. 245 

water, and for protection against individ- 
ual violence. Would they not have to 
bind themselves together by some kind of 
social contract, or compact ? If a number 
of men should imite themselves into a syn- 
dicate for the purpose of building houses 
without reference to the laws of gravity, if 
they should declare it as their set purpose 
to so build houses as that the center of 
gravity should fall in a line outside the 
base, the whole company would be tried for 
lunacy and confined in the insane asylum. 
So the most summary and straightfor- 
ward methods should be adopted for rid- 
ding society of all that class of men who 
propose to manage human affairs with- 
out reference to the facts of man's na- 
ture and the laws of the universe. It is 
a question whether they should be put into 
an insane asylum or into a jail, for it is 
hard to determine which they have the most 
of : insane stupidity or insane meanness. 



246 RIOHTEO USNESS. 

Society has made great advances, but 
every increment of progress has been along 
the lines of the eternal la^vs of the universe. 
Those laws were here before man apjDeared 
upon the stage of action ; they will be here 
when he is gone. Men may doctor them- 
selves with error about truth, and error 
about right, until they come to be great 
imbeciles; but the trutli and the right will 
remain clear and immortal for the intellect 
and the will of the wise and the good. 

VIII. 

It is important, as never before, for those 
who see the truth and recognize the right 
to declare the same with all authority. It 
is said that the Emperor Henry IV. stood 
shivering two whole days and nights in the 
snows of the courtyard of Canossa Castle, 
suing piteously for jDermission to throw 
himself, in agonized submission, at the feet 
of Hildebrand. That he was shunned by 



RIGHTEOUSNESS. 247 



his subjects more absolutely because of the 
ban that ^s^as upon him than he would 
have been had he been afflicted ^vith the 
smallpox. This incident illustrates for us 
the authority wielded by the Church of 
the Middle Ages. The Church w^as then 
felt to be in touch with tremendous power. 
Its fulminations carried terror to the hearts 
of kings and subjects. What the Church 
deciared should be done, or should be left 
undone, the people felt could only be dis- 
regarded at the peril of all hope for time 
and eternity. It not only declared the 
duties men w^ere under the necessity of ob- 
serving in order to save their souls, but the 
kind of thoughts men w^ere under the neces- 
sity of thinking concerning the shape of 
the earth, the movements of the stars, and 
the structure of the human body, in order 
to save themselves from the odium of 
heresy. The Church reigned without a 
rival in all the civilized w^orld. She was 



248 RI0HTE0U8NES8. 



not expected to give any reason for lier 
actions or her utterances. When she de- 
termined what the order of the solar sys- 
tem was, the brains of men were compelled, 
without question, to acquiesce. Even to 
doubt was to deny the faith. The Church 
dictated the policy of the stars without 
being at the trouble of studying the stars ; 
and no other sidereal opinions were toler- 
ated but such as she formulated and ^b- 
lished. 

But the minds of scholars and students, 
in different parts of Europe, began to reach 
other conclusions concerning the nature and 
order of things than such as had been ec- 
clesiastically settled for them. Copernicus 
saw that the heavenly bodies did not move 
in accordance mth the teachings of the 
Church. And w^hen the Venetian scholars 
looked through the telescope of Galileo at 
Padua, and saw Jupiter and his satellites, 
a central sun and revolving planets, the 



RIGHTEOUSNESS. 249 

authority of tlie Cliurch on the subject of 
astrouomy was gone. In this way the 
Church has been forced to give up one 
position after another. The people, seeing 
she had no foundation for the opinions she 
held concerning nature, began to question 
the value of her opinions concerning God, 
and heaven and hell, and right and wrong. 
Now the Church must regain her note of 
authority. She must do this by seeing 
what the laws are which grow out of the 
facts of condition. The laws of the family 
are to be deduced from the truths of rela- 
tion which constitute the family. These 
will be seen to coincide with the old laws 
uttered from Sinai. The laws of society 
are to be deduced from the truths of rela- 
tion which constitute society. These, it 
will be seen, are summed up as was said of 
old in the formula, " Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself." When men get 
through framing laws for the regulation of 



250 RIGHTEOUSNESS. 



human conduct, from a study of tlie facts 
of liuman nature, they will find to their 
amazement that they have reinstated the 
Ten Commandments, and that Sinai is not 
a burnt out volcano. They mil find that 
the Ten Commandments are still the foun- 
dations of social health, and harmony, and 
progress. God ^vrote them for Moses on 
tables of stone because he had already 
written them in the nature of man. The 
laws of gravity can no more be read out of 
the world of space than the Eternal Deca- 
logue can be read out of the world of 
human life. So the man of law should 
speak with the same authoi'ity as the man 
of science, without apology and without 
misgivings. 



BEA UTY. 



** If the endeavor to analyze the world is a trifle, it 
is because the world is such. The sum of things can 
have uo second intention, nor can it be characterized 
by any trait that is not included in itself. Some 
things are sweet, but what is our sense which perceives 
them ; some things are good, but what is our con- 
science which judges them ; some things are true, but 
what is our intellect which argues them ; some things 
are deep, but what is our reason which fathoms them? 
Everyone who thinks deeply, must have reflected 
that, if the purposes and results of man's practice are 
vanity, so also must be those of his speculation. 
Groethe said, that there was no refuge from virtues 
that were not our own, but in loving them ; and Ec- 
clesiastes, that there was none from the vanity of 
life, but in fearing and obeying God. So, also, from 
the vanity of speculation there is no refuge but in 
acquiescing in its relative nature, and accepting truth 
for what it is." 



CHAPTER V. 

THE PEOVISIOI^ FOR THE ESTHETIC NATUEE 
OF MAN. 

The glory of tlie mind is the possession 
of two eyes, tlie eye of sense and the eye of 
reason. Through the one, it looks out up- 
on the world of matter and fact. Through 
the other, it beholds the world of idea and 
relation. The world of matter and fact, 
seen through the eye of sense, is lifted and 
transfigured and multiplied a thousandfold 
when contemplated through the eye of 
reason. When the literal world is trans- 
ferred to the ideal world, it takes on hues 
and dimensions in accordance with the uni- 
versal and illimitable nature of man. The 
\\^orld which the sense sees, and the world 
which the reason sees, are both real, and 

253 



254 BEAUTY. 



through the mind commerce is kept up 
between them. Along this mental high- 
way facts make a pilgrimage to the holy 
land of reason ; there they are changed into 
ideas. Stars are turned into astronomy, 
atoms into chemistry, rocks into geology, 
plants into botany, colors into beauty and 
sounds into harmony. 

Over the same royal road, ideas pass to 
the world of sense. There they are changed 
again into facts. Ideas of beauty, distilled 
in the alembic of the imagination from the 
seven j^rismatic colors, are turned into paint- 
ing, and Kaphael's "Transfiguration" blesses 
the world. Ideas of harmony, formed 
by the power of the imagination from the 
notes of the musical scale, are turned into 
song, and HandePs " Messiah " agitates the 
thoughts and feelings of men with the 
melody of the skies. Ideas of form, deduced 
from the contemi3latIon of the shapes of 
things, are turned into sculpture, and 



BEAUTY. 255 



Michael Augelo's '-Moses" augments the 
world's fund of conviction and courage. 
By changing facts into ideas, the mind gives 
us science. By changing ideas back to 
facts, it gives us art. Without science, life 
would be without bread ; without art, it 
would be without ideals. 

Science ministers to the body, art to the 
S23ii'it. Men w^ho go from things to ideas 
are practical ; those who go from ideas back 
to things are the seers. Practical men con- 
serve, but never venture. Seers throw the 
light of their genius into the dark beyond, 
disclosing new worlds for men. They are 
the leaders, they are in the vanguard of 
human progress. 

By the possession of two eyes, the eye of 
sense and the eye of reason, man is placed 
into relation witk two woi'lds. 

The world he sees by the eye of sense is 
meager, limited^ poverty-stricken. There 
are only a few houses in it, a little clump 



256 BBA UTY. 



of trees, a little patch of meadow, a horizon 
bounded by the curl of his cabin smoke. 
The world he sees by the eye of reason 
stretches far down into the twilight of the 
past, embracing all ages, all stages of pro- 
gress, all empires and republics, all litera- 
ture and peoples. 

Through the eye of sense, he sees a world 
of hard limitation and fact. Through the 
eye of reason, a universe of ideas, visions, 
relations. Through the eye of sense, he 
sees a candle, wath its flickering and passing 
flame. Through the eye of reason, he sees a 
kingdom of light, with truth and beauty, 
and love billowing away to infinity. 

Through the eye of sense he sees a little 
mountain spring rise from the ground, to 
lose itself in the deepening shadows of the 
trees. Through the eye of reason he sees 
a river, clear as crystal, flowing forever 
from under the throne of God. A few 
violets and buttercups, covering with their 



BEAUTY. 257 



blue and their beauty a little strip of 
meadow, he sees through the eye of sense. 
The hills of day, numberless and im- 
measurable, covered with flowers, whose 
leaves never wither and whose beauty never 
fades, he sees through the eye of reason. 
It is the conceit of those whose habit of 
mind is to look through the eye of sense 
alone, that they see more in the actual 
tangible world than those who are ac- 
customed to look through the eye of reason 
as well as through the eye of sense. There 
never was a greater mistake. Those who 
see most in the world of mountain and sea 
and sky, are those who look most through 
the eye of reason into the world of idea, 
principle, and relation. Adams in England, 
and Leverrier in France, discovered Nep- 
tune, not by sweeping the heavens with 
their telescopes, but by careful ciphering in 
their studies. '^ Mr. Turner," said a friend 
to him one day, " I never see in nature the 



258 BEAUTY. 



glows and colors you put into your pictures." 
" Ah ! don't you wish you could, though," 
was the painter's reply. In an apple's fall 
IN'ewton sees the law of gravitation. 
Groethe sees in the sections of a deer's 
skull the spinal column modified. Emer- 
son sings : 

" Let me go where'er I will, 
I hear a sky-born music still. 
'Tis not in the stars alone, 
Nor in the cups of budding flowers, 
Nor in the red-breast's j^ellow tone, 
Nor in tlie bow that smiles in showers ; 
But in the mud and scum of things, 
There always, always something sings." 

Humboldt habitually dwelt in the realm 

of principles and ideas. He spent only 

five years in America, and it took twelve 

quartos, and sixteen folios, and half a 

dozen helpers, and many years to put on 

record what he saw. 

*' The poem hangs on the berry bush, 
"When comes the poet's eye. 
And the street is one long masquerade 
When Shaksj^ere passes by." 



BEAUTY. 259 



I. 

Yet the mind must first see througli the 
eye of sense, before it is capable of seeing 
through the eye of reason. The universe, 
that really belongs to the mind, the eye of 
sense never sees, but it sees something that 
suggests it. Through the eye of sense man 
takes in a few colors, but these suggest 
to Rubens the magnificent visions which 
illuminate the art galleries of Europe. 
Through the sense man hears a few notes, 
but these are taken and multiplied into 
the symphonies of Beethoven. 

Through the eye of sense, Columbus 
sees a few pieces of driftwood brought to 
the sliore by the waves of the ever-restless 
sea ; but these help him, through the eye of 
reason, to see a new world with its virgin 
forests, its wide-reaching plains and its 
majestic mountain ranges. Agassiz sees 
through the eye of sense an indentation on 



260 BEAUTY. 



a rock in the State of Maine. This gives 
him a suggestion which helps him to see, 
through the eye of reason, the icebergs and 
the glaciers, which, in the early ages, 
ground their way to the south. The man 
of science sees through the eye of sense, 
only a bit of chalk ; but from this a sugges- 
tion comes to him, which enables him to 
see through the eye of reason the oozy bed 
upon which the submarine cable rests ; and 
the life that sported in the vast oceans 
when the Dover Cliifs were being formed. 
Through the eye of sense Cuvier sees an 
immense tooth, larger than any known at 
the present. Through the eye of reason 
he sees the huge animal in whose jaw it 
was set. Upon the comprehensive, active 
power of reason, man relies to determine 
for him the elements good for food, the 
power which serves his social nature, the 
truth which furnishes his intellect, the 
rioht which matches his will, and the 



BEAUTY. 261 



beauty which corresjDonds with his 
aesthetic nature. 

The universe lends itself in its totality 
to the scale and the dip of the particular 
capacity or power through ^vhich man, for 
the time being, seeks to appropriate it. It 
stands before the sense of hunger in terms 
of bread. It stands before the social na- 
ture in terms of power. It stands before 
the intellect in terms of truth. It stands 
before the will in terms of law. It stands 
before the aesthetic nature in terms of 
beauty. The person who has related him- 
self to the world through all the powers of 
his nature, finds it capable, by turns, of 
feeding every faculty with which he is en- 
dowed. The universe is now all bread, 
now all power, now all truth, now all laAv, 
and now all beauty. It will be any or all 
of these, according to the side, or sides, of 
himself through which he addresses it. 
One of the great discoveries of modern 



262 BEAUTY. 



times is tlie correlation of forces. The per- 
sistent force may express itself in heat, or 
light, or electricity, or magnetism. These 
are only different forms of the same thing, 
and any one may pass to any of the others. 
In the world, as a whole, we find the sense 
of congelation inheres, as it relates itself to 
the different faculties man has for taking 
hold of it. As the correlate of hunger, it 
is all bread ; as the correlate of the social 
nature, it is all power ; as the correlate of 
the intellect, it is all truth ; as the correlate 
of the will, it is all law, and as the correlate 
of the gesthetic sense, it is all beauty. Ob- 
jective reality is addressed to the many 
sides of human life, in order that the 
whole of it may be used up for the purpose 
of making a man. It is all to be drawn 
into manhood. As all rivers meet in the 
ocean, and all colors meet in the white ray 
of light ; so objective reality, in all that it is 
for food, for power, foi' truth, for right, for 



BEAUTY. 263 



Ijeauty ; is to meet in liiiman life, for- nutri- 
ment, for furnisliment, and for the com]3le- 
tion of manhood. If you want to know 
what the objective self of the fish is, look 
at the ocean. If you want to know what 
the objective self of the eagle is, look at 
the sky. If you Avant to know what the 
objective self of the elephant is, look at the 
Asiatic jungle. If you want to know^ what 
the objective self of man is, look at the 
conditions of food, power, truth, law, and 
beauty which environ him. The fish gets 
the water, the bird gets the air, and the ele- 
phant gets the jungle ; but man, wdth a 
nature illimitable, with capacities inex- 
haustible, with hunger deep as truth, with 
aspirations as wide as right, and with an 
ideal as unfathomable as beauty, is the 
child of the eternal God, and is to get the 
fullness of his nature in nothing less than 
the entire expression w^hich God has made 
of himself in objective reality. 



264 BEAUTY. 



II. 

All truth, as we have before stated, 
which man has tried to express, is but a 
transcript of divine truth. The truth of 
astronomy is a transcript from the reality of 
the stars. The truth of botany is a tran- 
script from the reality of plants. The 
truth of geology is a transcript from the 
reality of the earth's structure. All right, 
which man has sought to embody in stat- 
utes, in constitutions, in enactments, is but 
a transcript fi^om the mil of God. So all 
beauty, which man has attempted to sym- 
bolize, is contained in the nature of things, 
and has its source in God. The beauty 
man has seen has taken in the process of 
history many forms. It is seen in archi- 
tecture, sculpture, poetry, painting, and 
music. These are different forms of the 
same thing. As the persistent physical 
force expresses itself in heat, light, electric- 



BEAUTY. 265 



ity, and magnetism, so genius is the persist- 
ent mental force wliicla expresses itself in 
art. Sometimes the persistent mental force 
comes to such unity and fullness in some 
massive soul that from him it goes out into 
all the fine arts. Michael Angelo was by 
turns poet, painter, sculptor, and architect. 
Had he lived in Germany in the time of 
Beethoven he would have added to his 
other accomplishments that of music. The 
noblest specimens of music are only great 
cathedrals constructed out of sound, as 
Michael Angelo's *^ Moses " was a great epic 
poem wrought in stone. 

We wish to consider beauty in its re- 
lation to the aesthetic sense, in two aspects 
of itself. 

The most important forms of beauty 
have as the physical conditions of their ex- 
istence light and sound, and as the ideal 
conditions of their existence space and time. 
The names man gives to these forms of 



266 BEAUTY. 



beauty, when he expi'esses them, or re-ex- 
presses them, are painting and music. For 
no element of man's nature has more mar- 
velous provision been made than for the aes- 
thetic element. The objective conditions 
of the beauty, which correspond to the sub- 
jective aesthetic sense, are contained in 
sound and light. Sound and light are the 
invisible physical forces which play upon 
the objects of nature, and call from them 
the responses of melody and vision which 
the aesthetic nature appropriates for ecstasy 
and delight. 

Capacity for sound is lodged m well-nigh 
all created objects. Minerals, woods, gases, 
and liquids even, contain the notes of the 
musical scale. Builders of pianos, harps, 
put no notes in the elements they use in 
' the construction of these instruments. 
They simply comply with conditions neces- 
sary to bring them out. The music we 
get out of wood and steel and brass, as we 



BEAUTY. 267 



find them arrauged in the piano, the organ, 
the harp, by striking them at regular inter- 
vals, is the melody breathed into them when 
they were created. Beethoven, Handel, 
and Mozart created no music. Their genius 
was manifested simply in the power to 
bring out of forest and mine and cane-brake 
what God put into them. 

As to what note a body shall give up 
under tension and pressure, is owing to its 
ultimate structure, and the elements which 
compose it ; and also the note latent in the 
object by which it is struck, or pressed. 
Sing into a piano and the same notes re- 
spond which are used in the execution of 
the song. A storm, howling through a 
forest, makes a loud noise, but no music. 
Its notes do not synchronize with those con- 
tained in the limbs and leaves of the trees. 
But when the low, sad murmur of the even- 
ing winds gently strike the needles of the 
long-leaf pine there is music. The notes of 



268 BEAUTY. 



the one are related to tlie notes of the 
other. 

As all things have capacity for sound, so 
well-nigh all created things have capacity 
for color. The color which an object takes 
on in the presence of light is determined 
also by its ultimate structure and the ele- 
ments which constitute it. Nearly every 
object absorbs a portion of the light and 
throws back to the eye of the beholder a 
portion. Bodies absorb those rays which 
are synchronous with their constituent ele- 
ments. AVhen the particles which compose 
a body are not capable of vibrating at the 
rate of any portion of the light particles, 
then they are all thrown back, and the body 
is pronounced white. It is to be observed 
that no body has color or sound of its own, 
but only the capacity for these. The note 
of a body is discovered by striking it, and 
its color by stimulating it with a light ray. 

Another interesting fact is to be noted 



BEAUTY. 269 



here — that is the analogy between sound 
and light, or music and painting. The 
difference between a sound wave and a 
light ^vave is only a difference of length. 
The principles underlying them are the 
same, and the methods by which they are 
produced are the same. Sound waves, to 
be heard, must vibrate at least as often as 
sixteen beats to the second. Light waves, 
in order to pass through the organ of vision, 
and reach the retina of the eye, must not 
vibrate at a less rate than four hundred 
trillions of times to the second. The differ- 
ence between the eye and the ear is, one is 
more refined than the other ? A painting 
is a silent piece of music, and a piece of 
music is an audible picture. The notes of 
the musical scale and the colors of the pris- 
matic scale are analogous. The distance 
between C and A of the musical scale is 
the same as the distance between red and 
orange of the prismatic scale. The notes of 



270 BEAUTY. 



the one scale may be translated into the 
colors of the other. Harmony of colors in 
a silk dress, would, if translated into their 
analogous notes, produce a piece of music 
that would be equally as pleasing to the 
ear as the colors are to the eye. Painting 
is only a more refined form of music. This 
is not fancy ; it is mathematics and science. 
All things about us are capable of music, 
silent or audible. Notes belonging to some 
part of a great song are lodged in all 
created objects. Things are not measured 
off in continents, oceans, islands, mountains, 
forests, and mines onl}^, but also in octaves. 
The music of the spheres is no longer a 
dream of the poets, but in accordance with 
exact science. The material system into 
w^hich we are born is capable, then, not 
only of furnishing us food to eat and clothes 
to wear, but music and painting for the 
sense of the beautiful. A mere utilitarian, 
bread-and-butter philosophy does not ex- 



BEAUTY. 2Y1 



Laust the possibilities of even the material 
world. In its very construction respect to 
man's liiglier nature was had, as well as to 
his lower. By so much as music and har- 
mony of color surpass in their subtlety and 
refinement the coarser elements necessary 
to sustain the lo^ver nature ; by so much 
has God emphasized the value of the higher 
nature. Had God intended his children 
for no higher plane than that upon which 
the animals live, and no greater future for 
them than that which belongs to " the 
beasts that perish," doubtless the beauty 
would have been left out. Men have been 
told, by one having authority, not to cast 
their pearls before swine. The beauty that 
was flung at the feet of man contained a 
message to a side of himself keyed to a 
radiant and impeiishable realm. 

Who does not feel, under the charm of 
music, or the influence of a great painting, 
reasons for high living which no words can 



272 BEAUTY. 



express ? The tear whieli often gathers in 
the eye of the most abandoned, hardened 
man, under the power of song, bespeaks the 
fact that chords have been touched which 
vibrate responsive to no earthly interest or 
relation. 

III. 

The melody in sound and the harmony 
in color are correlated to the aesthetic 
nature of man through the ear and the 
eye. In the ear is found the musical 
scale, and in the eye the prismatic scale. 

Notes are in the ear which correspond 
with the C D E F G A B of the musical 
scale, and parts are in the eye which 
correspond to the red, orange, yellow, 
green, blue, indigo, and violet of the pris- 
matic scale. It is only through D in the 
ear that D out of the ear can be heard, 
and it is with in the ear that C out of 
the ear is heard. 

If there were no notes in the ear except 



BEAUTY. 273 



D, and all other notes in nature were 
destroyed, the ear could hear no notes at 
all. A hears A, and B hears B, and C 
hears C. What A hears, B does not hear, 
and what C hears, A does not hear. What 
is true of the ear is true of the eye. The 
parts of the eye with which red is seen are 
not the parts Avith which green is seen. 
Red in the eye sees red out of the eye. 
Blue in the eye sees blue out of the eye, 
and gi'een in the eye sees green out of the 
eye. If there was in the prismatic scale 
located in the eye only the part with 
which blue is seen, no color in the world 
would be visible except the blue. The 
notes latent in all natural objects are 
addressed to the aesthetic sense, through 
the corresponding notes latent in the ear ; 
and the seven colors, capacity for which is 
latent in all earthly objects, address them- 
selves to the aesthetic nature through the 
corresponding capacities for color con- 



274 BEAUTY. 



tained in tlie eye. That man is related to 
the kingdom of beauty in a sense wMcli 
marks Mm off from tlie animals below 
him, is proven by the fact that he can take 
the elements of this kingdom into his 
imagination and send them back to the 
realms of sense, in oratorios and paintings. 
The masters have given all history ideal 
and permanent setting by means of sound 
and light. Man cannot only see the truth, 
but repeat it ; not only recognize the 
right, but conform to it, and not only 
appreciate beauty, but exj^ress it. In this 
he has the evidence of his kinship mth 
the author of the true, the good, and the 
beautiful. The lo^ver animals, as far as 
we know, may be thrilled with that 
which is beautiful ; we do know they never 
repeat the beautiful. In the art galleries 
and conservatories of the world all the 
past is brought to life again and stands 
before the eye and the ear, under the ideal 



REAUTT. 275 



fomis of time and space. Moses is not 
onl}' immortal in the laws which he wrote, 
and in the race which he civilized, but, 
through Michael Angelo's genius, he has 
been made eternal in the kingdom of 
beauty. 

Thus, through his aesthetic side, man 
not only receives, but he gives. The 
melody of sound and the harmony of color 
not only come to him, but go from him ; 
and" from him, too, charged and shot 
through mth all the suffering, temptation, 
sin, and sacrifice he has known. 

IV. 

The empirical philosophy, which re- 
duces knowledge to sensations and moral- 
ity to laws imposed by prudence, and man 
himself to the same plane of life occujDied 
by the lower animals, invades the domain 
of aesthetics, and makes of beauty a mere 
matter of individual feeling, local conven- 



276 BEAUTY. 



tion, and arbitrary fasMon. This philoso- 
phy of the dirt denies to mind any 
inherent, creative activity, in the region 
of knowledge, morals, or art. ]S"ow, it 
is doubtless true, that food and power 
and beauty of color and tone are ad- 
dressed to the lo\ver animals ; sufficiently, 
at least, for them to get the means 
of subsistence, and some low sort of 
pleasure from them. They do this, how- 
ever, not by reason, but by instinct. The 
bee is determined by its nature to build 
his cell in accordance with mathematical 
principles, and to store it with honey from 
the leaves and the flowers. The bee does 
this as naturally as water runs do^^^l-hill. 
There is no calculation in it, and the bee 
does not recognize itself in the process of 
this work. 

The bird may be determined in the se- 
lection of its mate by brilliant plumage, or 
joyous song, but this it does just as a rock 



BEAUTY. 277 



tiu'iiecl loose from the top of a house falls 
to the ground. The evidence of a combin- 
ing, mental activity in man, to which things 
in the outside world are addressed, in a 
peculiar and distinct sense, is found in the 
fact that man not only receives the things 
that come to him, but sends them from 
him in the forms of his own thought. 

The bee appropriates the honeydew 
that covers the surface of the leaves, stores 
it in his cell, and eats it in the winter ; but 
who ever knew bees to plant out trees in 
order that there might be leaves from 
which to secure honeydew? Man finds 
the bananas that grow in the tropics, and 
the berries that grow in the temperate 
zones, and eats them ; but he sees how 
bananas and berries grow, and so clears 
fields and hedges, to insure a more abun- 
dant crop. 

The monkey hears the thunder and sees 
the lightning as well as the man, but man 



278 BEAUTY. 



investigates the nature of liglitning ; he 
sees the principle underlying its weird 
movements, the things for which it has 
affinity. So he contrives various methods 
for utilizing it. The mind within him be- 
ing the same in kind as the mind which 
sends the lightning, he sees how lightning 
is sent, and sends it. He not only sees 
thunder-storms, but how they are made. 
So the professor creates them in glass" jars 
for the benefit of his class. 

Nature presents herself to man under 
uniform methods of action. Everywhere 
is regularity and orderliness. He repro- 
duces this oi-der in political and social life. 
The laws without him kindle into expres- 
sion the moral magazine of volition within 
him. 

Nature presents herself to man as unity. 
This implies mind. Unity is impossible 
without mind. The mind underneath the 
unity, without him, speaks to the mind 



BEAUTY. 279 



within him. Then by his own mind he 
recreates the universe in literature. 

He hears the cawing of rooks, the cooing 
of (loves, the purling of brooks, and the 
roar of tempests. These, with all other 
sounds in nature, are caught and combined 
in the marvelous creation of Mozart and 
Beethoven. 

Much is said by the learned men w^ho 
are ever seeking to minify man's place in 
nature, about the reason and memory, and 
intelligence, and even conscience of the 
lower animals. It is almost enough to 
make one wish he w^ere a dog or a horse 
when he reads how much sense and how 
much conscience dogs and horses have. 
Not much weight, however, will ever be 
given to these long treatises on the intelli- 
gence of the lower animals, until some bee 
shall give us a book on mathematics, or 
until some horse shall tell through one of 
our agricultural journals the best time to 



280 BEAUTY. 



SOW clover ; or some dog shall give us 
tlie philosophy of the chase. We see the 
capacity of the human mind in Shak- 
spere's plays. So one picture painted by 
a cat, one poem written by a mule, one 
philosophical dissertation composed by an 
owl, or one cocoanut plantation planted by 
the monkeys, would establish beyond ques- 
tion that the high claims made for the 
mental capabilities of these humble mem- 
bers of the animal creation are justified. 

Man grows wheat by the use of the 
mind Avithin him, which sees how the 
mind without him has made the growth of 
wheat possible. Man utilizes power, by 
the use of the mind mthin him, which 
recognizes how po^ver is produced and con- 
trolled by the mind without him. Man 
sees truth, because the mind within him is 
like the mind without him, which ex- 
presses itself in truth. Man sees law, be- 
cause the mind within him is like the 



BEAUTY. 281 



mind without liim wbicli ordained law. 
So man sees beauty, because tlie mind 
within him is like the mind without him, 
which expresses itself in beaut}'. Food, 
and truth, and law, and beauty, cannot be 
reproduced by man, excej^t by the laws of 
mind acting in him as the laws of mind 
do without him. 

V. 

What is the use of beauty ? Like truth 
and law, it looks beyond itself. It is to 
help realize the purpose for ^vhich the 
earth was created, the purpose which finds 
its consummation in a perfect man. 

Beauty comes to man, bearing intima- 
tions of his high origin and also of his 
glorious destiny. Under the magic spell 
Av^hich beauty throws around him, he for- 
gets for the time being his limitations, his 
fears, his doubts. He is lifted into a 
realm of universal freedom, where all dif- 



282 BEAUTY. 



ficulties disappear, where all conflicts are 
eliminated. The aesthetic nature is not at 
all seclusive and aristocratic. It receives 
the melody, and symmetry, and harmony 
which reason finds in the tones, and forms, 
and colors of the outside world, and turns 
over to it. These rich gifts are then 
shared with all other human po^vers and 
faculties. Hunger is served with food 
set in painted china. Around the table, 
where man satisfies his appetite, pictures 
are hung, and the beef market and the 
mill are built and arranged in accordance 
with the dictates of symmetry and taste. 
The college, ^vhere truth is taught, and the 
courthouse, where law is administered, 
are invested Avith all the beauty of the 
architect's genius. Thus beauty, high, 
heaven-born, and refreshing, is drawn into 
all the relations, and thrown around all the 
institutions of life. It reduces friction, 
redresses littleness, and adds to life good 



BEAUTY. 283 



cheer and depth. It smoothes the rough 
places, rounds the sharp corners, and hangs 
the bow of hope on the dark cloud of com- 
ing trial. 

The aesthetic sense, nurtured on beauty, 
keeps before the minds of men and nations 
a proper ideal of life. When the ideal 
held before the mind at one period of ad- 
vancement is reached, the aesthetic sense 
has already lifted another and a nobler, as 
far ahead of the actual as the first. In pre- 
senting to the living spirit ideals always in 
advance of actual attainment, the aesthetic 
nature opens the unending prih of pro- 
gress. It is incorrect to suppose that the 
ideal is worked out only in painting, sym- 
phony, or cathedral. Its presence is mani- 
fest in the useful, as well as the fine arts. 
The ideal often gets itself translated into 
the heal of a shoe, into the crown of a hat, 
into the ^\'heel of a wagon, into the fence 
around the field, and into the structure of 



284 BEAUTY. 



the mower and tlie reaper. It curves in 
the arches of bridges, echoes in the sound 
of the hammer, and breaks over the hills in 
the whistle of the engine. 

The progress of beauty in modern times 
has not been in the direction of form or 
coloring or symmetry, simply, but toward 
wider distribution. In early times, its 
ministry was to kings and scholars ; it has 
advanced by expanding. The pyramid of 
Gizeh, the most expensive monument ever 
seen, was reared to perpetuate the memory 
of a great Egyptian king. A country was 
drained of revenue and of life to regale the 
pride of one man. The Parthenon min- 
istered to a few great men in Gi^eece. The 
cathedrals of the middle ages blest and 
helped a wider circle. But it was left to 
the time which is ours to build churches 
and chapels, as broad in their aims and 
ministry as the life of humanit}^ The 
early poetry concerned itself about the 



BEAUTY. 285 



wars of gods and the contentions of kings. 
But as tlie sacredness of human life came 
to be seen more and more, did it tend to 
catch within the sweep of its rhythm the 
incidents and traditions and loves of the 
common people. The ideal in our day is 
being worked out in fields of weaving grain, 
into the cattle upon the hills, into the 
homes of the people. It is being turned 
into orchards and vineyards. It is being 
traced in vines and flowers over the poor 
man's cottage. The ideals were once 
housed and confined in the museums ; 
now they are being turned out into the 
street. It was once the custom to bring 
Venus and Diana, by the aid of the chisel, 
from rough marble. The tendency now is 
to put the beauty of Venus and the enter- 
prise of Diana into the spirits of our 
women. Sublime conceptions were once 
mainly realized in temples and cathedrals, 
but now w^e would see them distributed 



286 BEAUTY. 



into dwellings for families, into schools 
for eliildren, and into cliurclies for tlie 
true woi'ship of God. We would see them 
in bridges spanning all the rivers, in mills 
grinding the people's bread, in factories 
spinning their clothes, and in railroads 
transporting their products. We would 
see them lifted into an asylum for the 
blind, a shelter for the orphan, and a home 
for the aged and infirm. We would hear 
them in the whirl of the spindle, in the ring 
of the hammer, in the splash of the paddle, 
and in the sound of the flying train. We 
would hear them in the steady march of 
progress, and in the pulse-beats of the 
happy plowman. Beauty is to be used 
to stimulate human courage, to embellish 
human spirit, and to enlarge human thought. 
Life's shadows are to be chased by the light 
of eternity's day, and its tumult hushed by 
the repose of eternity's harmony. The 
aesthetic element in man's nature was 



BEAUTY. 287 

appointed to receive the beauty provided 
for it. But it was to be God's almoner ; 
having received it, also freely to give it. 
Thus it was to be the power whose func- 
tion should be to put the whole of life into 
terms of harmony. Bernard Palissy put 
his ideal into a white enamel for his pot- 
tery ; Columbus worked his ideal into a new 
world ; Morse left his in the electric tele- 
graph ; Cp'us W. Field turned his into the 
submarine cable ; and Thomas A. Edison 
has given his to the world in the telephone. 
It is not to be infeiTed, however, that those 
who work their ideals out in the useful 
arts contribute more to the making of men 
than those who express their ideals in 
poetiy, painting, sculpture, or music. The 
tendency of beauty to get down into the 
ordinary work and relations of life is an 
intimation that all life should be beautiful 
in itself, and in all expressions which it 
makes of itself. The aesthetic sense is the 



288 BEAUTY. 



badge of man's royalty. A tutor was onee 
employed to teach the son of a king. The 
young prince was sometimes disobedient 
But in the esteem of the tutor, it was not 
quite proper to whip the son of a king with 
a common switch. So to the lapel of the 
boy's coat the teacher pinned a piece of 
pui^le ribbon. When the young prince 
manifested a disposition to defy authority, 
the instructor pointed with the end of the 
rod to the purple ribbon on his coat. This 
was an appeal to his royal blood. 

Not a flower gathers on the limbs of a 
rose bush but addresses the high and purple 
nature of everyone who beholds it. In 
Mexico, where the average of life is so low, 
the flowers which grow in such profusion 
are about all that is left to keep the people 
reminded that they are the children of Grod, 
the author of all beauty. The highest 
evidence of the remaining worth of the 
Mexican people is found in the fact that 



BEAUTY. 289 



they love flowers with a deep and unfailing 
passion. 

IV. 

Beauty is to feed enthusiasm. Tones 
and colors are to be used to jostle the ele- 
ments of mind, and mil, and emotion into 
harmony with the high and holy life of our 
Father who art in Heaven. Beauty is to 
nerve the soldier for the battle, the martyr 
for the stake, and the hero for his work. 
There is a height of development to which 
the human spirit aspires, that the logical 
understanding is unable to reach. Here, 
then, where truth in logical form fails, 
beauty comes, and helps the human spirit 
to disentangle itself from the sphere of 
contradictions and antagonisms. 

Truth and right command the spirit by 
an external necessity ; beauty moves it by 
an internal necessity and starts it to vibrat- 
ing in the very centers of its being, in con- 
sonance with itself. Beauty lifts it to a 



290 BEAUTY. 



pinnacle where the horizon quadrates with 
its irrepressible longings; and where the 
whole of life is rounded into an orb from 
which all strife is eliminated, and all dis- 
cord extracted. Men seek artificial stimu- 
lants and narcotics, because of the abiding 
conviction they have, that their lives were 
keyed to some ideal realm of unity and 
freedom. 

What intoxicants do to the detriment of 
the spirit, beauty accomplishes to its health 
and vigor. It is carried by beauty into no 
land of vague dream, and unreal delirium, 
but into a radiant region where the envir- 
oning conditions exactly match its undying 
hopes. 



LOVE. 



" There are indeed men whose souls are like the sea. 
Those billows that ebb and flood, that inexorable go- 
ing and coming, that noise of all the winds, that 
blackness and that translucency, that vegetation 
peculiar to the deep, that democracy of clouds in full 
hurricane, those eagles flecked with foam, those 
wonderful star-risings reflected in mysterious agita- 
tion by millions of luminous wavetops, confused 
heads of the multitudinous sea — the errant lightnings, 
which seem to watch ; those prodigious sobbings, 
those half-seen monsters, those nights of darkness 
broken by bowlings, those furies, those frenzies, 
those torments, those rocks, those shipwrecks, those 
fleets crushing each other ; then that charm, that 
mildness, those festivals, those gay white sails, those 
fishing boats, those songs amid the uproar, those 
shining ports, those mists rising from the shore ; 
those wraths and those appeasements, that all in one, 
the unforeseen amid the changeless, the vast marvel 
of inexhaustibly varied monotony — all this may 
exist in a mind, and that mind is called genius, and 
you have ^schylus, j^ou have Isaiah, you have 
Dante, you have Michael Angelo, you have Shak- 
spere." 



i 



i 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE PEOVISION FOE THE SPIRITUAL JSTATURE 

OF MAN. 

In speaking of the spiritual nature of 
man, reference is not had to a side or fac- 
ulty or power of himself, but to his real, 
essential life. Man is a spirit. All facul- 
ties and powers exist for him as such. The 
hunger, and the food ^^rovided for it, are to 
serve man as spirit. The social element, 
and the power provided for it, are to serve 
him as spirit. The intellect and truth, the 
will and right, the aesthetic sense and 
beauty, are all to serve him as spirit. The 
correlate of man as spirit, on one side of 
himself, we have seen to be the life of 
humanity — the correlate of man as spirit, 
on the other side of himself, is the life of 

293 



294 LOVE. 

God. Man's spiritual nature is mediated 
to him on one side by tlie family, by the 
school, by the institutions of the state, by 
the establishments of trade, by the news- 
paper, by literature, by art, by history. 
Man's spiritual nature is mediated to him 
on the other side by love, embodied in the 
one Mediator between God and man. 

The mud-philosophy of Locke, and 
Hume, and Mill, and Spencer dissolves 
spirit, because it dissolves the idea of a 
mind, an ego, or an external world. If the 
mind can know nothing but a succession of 
thino^s in time, if nothino- but a constant 
flow and flux of sensations ; of course it can- 
not know itself, only as a sensation in the 
perpetual procession of sensations always 
passing by. But how is it possible for the 
mind to know a succession of things in 
time, and a procession of things in space, 
unless it is itself out of and apart from the 
succession and the procession. One sensa- 



i 



LOVE. 295 

tion, say of the self, in a flow of sensations, 
could not know itself as a part of such a 
flow, without knowing itself as related to a 
before and an after in the process. To 
know even a procession of sensations, we 
must have a spirit that stands still and 
does not pass on with the procession. The 
spirit, then, must be out of time to know 
succession, and out of space to know pro- 
cession, and self-conscious, so as to distin- 
guish itself from the succession and the 
procession. The human spirit is something 
in the midst of time, yet passes not with 
the tides of time. It is to the succession 
of things ever passing through it, and to 
the procession of sensations ever passing 
before it, like some mighty Teneriife with 
its peak of Teyde in the midst of the sea, 
pushing its proud head up 12,000 feet 
above the sea, and contrasting with its ever 
changing waves, the immutability of eter- 
nity. Man, as a spirit, is after God, the 



296 LOVE. 

most universal of all facts. He is illimita- 
ble in more ways than space, remaining 
when all tlie events of time have passed, 
and with a nature dipping into the eternal 
spirit of God. The respect in which man 
is made in the image of God, is, that he 
is endowed with self-consciousness, and 
self-determination. Self -consciousness and 
self-determination are the universal forms 
of spiritual activity. Man, as a self-con- 
scious and self -determining spirit, is not in- 
dependent. He must find his true self 
beyond himself. He is dependent upon 
the absolute self-consciousness and self- 
determination of God. He is the child of 
God, and as there cannot be an absolute 
without a relative, he is the relativity of 
the absolute. God's nature is the ground 
of man's nature, and in God he is mirrored 
to himself. 

In God man lives and moves and has his 
being. In finding God, man finds himself. 



LOVE. 2-97 

In the revelation of God is tlie revelation 
of man. God is a spirit and man is a 
spirit ; but man, as a relative spirit, comes 
to himself in God, the absolute spirit; as 
the life-germ of the acorn comes to itself in 
the natural conditions of soil and sky which 
environ it. 

I. 

As man is essentially spirit, he can never 
come to unity, only as he comes to it in 
himself as a spirit. As long as he aban- 
dons himself to mere bread, or power, or 
knowledge, or law, or beauty, there is 
contradiction. Not in any one of these can 
he find full-orbed life. These all bring 
nutriment to him, as a spirit, from the sev- 
eral spheres to which they are variously 
correlated. But provision is made not only 
for the sides and faculties of himself, but 
for the essential nature of himself. We 
have seen how hunger was met by bread, 
the needs of the social nature by power, in- 



298 LOVE. 

tellect by truth, will by law, and the 
aesthetic sense by beauty ; but here we 
come to life, and find that love, timeless 
and illimitable love, alone corresponds to it. 
But love can ouly find its embodiment and 
its expression in life. Therefore, love has 
taken the form of life to meet the needs of 
man as a spirit. 

We do not propose to discuss this sub- 
ject dogmatically. The writer believes in 
dogmatism ; but in this w^ork the attempt 
has been to treat man, and the things pro- 
^dded for him, scientifically. We have taken 
nothing for granted, and have intended 
to say nothing but what was w^arranted 
by the facts. That man is a spirit, and re- 
lated to an unseen realm, is attested by the 
fact that all round this world temples and 
mosques, and synagogues and churches lift 
themselves sublimely, or modestly, to the 
sky. That there is something in man that 
seeks provision from beyond the range of 



LOVE. 299 

sense and sight, no one in his senses can 
deny. This deep and fundamental and ir- 
repressible need of man's nature finds its 
correlate in love. Speaking out of the 
depths of his life, it is an everlasting call 
for sympathy, for reconciliation, for pardon, 
for peace. Love gives sympathy, insures 
reconciliation, grants pardon, and secures 
peace. But love can only come from the 
unseen and eternal in the foi'm of life. 
Let us see how the love expressed in the 
life and sacrifice and death of Jesus Christ, 
as the embodiment of divine love, is set 
over against the spiritual nature of man, as 
its correlate ; as completely as bread is set 
over against hunger, or the truth against 
the intellect, or as beauty is set over against 
the aesthetic sense. We believe this is so 
in the nature of things, and will finally be 
taught as truth, as absolute and unfailing 
as the multiplication table. Men will come 
to it, after a while, not only as a dogmatic 



300 LOVE. 

doctrine taught by tlie churclies, but also 
as absolute doctrine, taught by the consti- 
tution and needs of human nature. The 
time will come when to doubt this will not 
simply be to write one's self down as mean, 
but as mentally unbalanced. If Jesus 
Christ, as love, is the correlate of the 
spiritual needs of the human race, then his 
life is peculiar and unique. It cannot be 
classed with any other life. It cannot be 
measured by any rule used to measure 
other things or other lives. We propose 
to test this life by a principle said, by 
scientific men, to have universal application 
in this time. 

XL 

The doctrine of the correlation, equival- 
ence, persistence, transmutability and in- 
destructibility of force, or the conservation 
of energy has had vast influence upon the 
thought and life of our time, It has fur- 



LOVE. 301 

nislied a new opening tlirougli wliicli to be- 
hold the nature of things. It has given to 
men a new working hypothesis and richer 
views and conceptions of the universe and 
its author. 

The tremendous advancement made in 
the material civilization of the present is 
due more to this than any other scientific 
doctrine or principle. According to Pro- 
fessor Balfour Stewart, there are eight forms 
of energy or force. The energy of visible 
motion, visible energy of position, heat 
motion, molecular separation, atomic or 
chemical separation, electrical separation, 
electricity in motion, and radiant energy. 
Now taking this earth as a complete whole, 
containing within itself all these forms of 
energy, and so isolated from the rest of the 
universe as to receive nothing from it 
and to add nothing to it, then the princi- 
ple of the correlation of forces asserts that 
the sum of all these forces is constant. 



302 LOVE. 

" This does not assert tliat each is constant 
in itself, or any other of the forms of force 
enumerated, for in truth they are always 
changing about into each other — now some 
visible energy being changed into heat or 
electricity, and heat or electricity being 
changed back again into visible energy ; 
but it only means that the sum of all the 
energies taken together is constant. There 
are eight variable quantities, and it is only 
asserted that their sum is constant, not by 
any means that they are constant them- 
selves." 

For the purpose of elucidating our prin- 
ciple in the realm of nature, we will con- 
sider it as it applies to some of the useful 
forces whose effects we can measure and 
whose origin we can trace and determine. 

There is the force of conserved fuel. 
Away back in the carboniferous period of 
the world's history, there grew immense 
forests, which in succeeding ages were 



LOVE. 303 

turned under the earth, and, in the process 
of the years, were changed into coal and 
oil and gas. These have been treasured 
for untold ages in the mountains and in the 
bowels of the earth. Now they are brought 
forth by the applied intelligence of man, 
to turn his wheel, draw his car, cook his 
food, propel his ploAv, and to light his 
home and his street. The force in one ton 
of coal is capable of accomplishing more 
work in a few hours than one man could 
in a lifetime. All this force, as well as 
that contained in the growing forests of to- 
day, originated in the sun. 

There is the conserved force of food. 
This is found primarily in the grass, the 
wheat, the rice, the fruit, which grow in 
our fields and orchards. The low^er ani- 
mals feed on these, and through the pro- 
cess of digestion and assimilation, they are 
transmuted into blood and bone and mus- 
cle — thus furnishing man, who stands at 



304 



LOVE. 



the top and tlie end of the creative pro- 
cess, with a more refined higher form of 
food. But whether in the shape of grass, 
rice, wheat, or in the more refined form of 
animal flesh, these various elements of food 
are only so much transmuted sunshine. 
Before they ever adorned the surface of 
our fields, or moved in the lowing herd 
over the meadow, they were held in solu- 
tion in the sunshine. The food, the fuel, 
and the animal life of our earth are all 
traceable to the sun. 

There is the conserved force of flowing 
water. This turns the wheel, spins the 
thread, gins the cotton, weaves the cloth, 
and grinds the corn. All the force that 
water possesses for the performance of 
work, comes from the sun. The warm 
rays of tlie sun, coming down on southern 
seas and rivers, causes the waters thereof 
to evaporate, and then it is carried on the 
wings of nortt-bound winds to a colder 



LOVE. 305 

clime. Tliere the difi'used waters gather 
themselves into clouds and fall in rain to 
flow down the rivers, thus exchanging 
their energy of position, which tliey have 
obtained from the sun, for the actual 
energy of the turning Avheel. 

There is also the conserved force of 
moving winds. By the aid of this ships 
spread their sails, and pass from continent 
to continent with the products of the 
earth. Again all the force the winds 
possess for the accomplishment of work 
comes from the sun. The rays of the 
sun come down with great intensity upon 
certain parts of the earth and heat the at- 
mosphere. Into these heated places come 
the winds from colder regions. Thus cur- 
rents and counter-currents are created. 
By putting the wheel of the vdndmill into 
these currents this force is converted into 
the ground wheat and the drawn water. 
Thus all the different forms of force dis> 



306 LOVE. 

played in the growing forests, the waving 
harvest fields, the flying birds, the lowing 
herds, the rushing railway train, the whir 
of the spindle, the ring of the hammer, and 
the pulsating blood come directly from the 
sun. The force, too, seen in all these phys- 
ical, vegetable, animal, commercial realms, 
is the exact equivalent of what was 
poured into them from the sun. The 
earth contains no other force capital than 
what was paid over to it by the sun. It 
has issued no currency of its ovna, not even 
enough to run a watcli, or to send the blood 
once around the body, or even to transport 
a piece of bread to a starving man. All 
the force our earth possesses is borrowed, 
and if we were to cease to borrow, we 
would be bankrupt in a single day. We 
are to remember, too, that by so much 
force as the sun has parted with to our 
earth, and to other worlds which look to it 
for supplies, by so much has its own force 



LOVE. 307 

been decreased. If we knew how mucli 
force the sun had in the beginning, and 
would subtract from this amount all that it 
has given away to the present time, we 
might be able to form some estimate of its 
assets to-day. 

We know not what the sun's resources 
are. We know not by what methods it 
has been replenishing its supplies of light 
and heat for ages past ; whether by chemi- 
cal combination, meteoric impact, or con- 
densation ; we only know by so much as it 
has in the ages past parted with, by so 
much less force it has to-day. That it has 
been able to supply our world and others 
like it, however, with heat and light and 
physical life for ages, is not at all strange 
when we remember what an immense ball 
of fire the sun is. It has a diameter of a 
million miles, in round numbers. Storms, 
which travel across our world at the rate 
of sixty miles an hour, would move across 



308 LOVE. 

the surface of tlie sun at the rate of twenty 
thousand miles an hour. The flames of a 
burning forest, which on our world would 
rise one hundred feet in the air, on the 
sun would rise to the height of two hundred 
thousand miles. The sun, too, has enough 
force on hand to supply our earth and others 
with heat for untold ages yet to come, but 
unless its supply is replenished, the time 
will come when it will be bankrupt and 
nothing but a burnt out char in the heavens. 
This is so, because the sun is the center of 
that great natural realm, the universal law 
of which is the law of exclusiveness. 

In accordance with this law what the 
sun has iu the way of force the other 
planets do not have, and what other planets 
obtain from the sun that body has forever 
lost. This is only another name for the 
law of the correlation of forces. This law 
applies not only to the force of the sun, 
but to all forces on this earth which come 



LOVE. 309 

from that body. AVhat one tree gathers 
into itself is at the expense of the general 
fnnd of force which goes to make trees. 
What one bird takes into his body is at 
the expense of all force Avhich goes to make 
birds. What one man takes into his 
physical frame is at the expense of the 
general fnnd of force which goes to make 
human bodies. Whatever amount of force 
is contained in the cloud, in conserved 
water to turn the wheel, or in conserved 
electricity to carry the message, is at the 
expense of the general fund of force. 

According to the doctrine of the correla- 
tion of forces, the rising up of force in one 
place involves the subsidence of force in 
another place. The amount rising up, too, 
is the exact equivalent of the amount sub- 
siding. When a rock falls from a church 
steeple the earth rises as much to meet the 
rock, in proportion to its mass, as the rock 
falls to meet the earth, in proportion to its 



310 LOVE. 

mass. When a man shoots a rifle ball 
from a gun, as much force goes back 
against his shoulder as goes out thi^ough 
the muzzle of the gun. What the gun 
lacks in velocity it makes up in mass, and 
what the ball lacks in mass it makes up in 
velocity. When a pine tree is cut down 
and split into small pieces and put into an 
engine, just the same amount of heat is 
gathered from it that ^vas garnered from 
the sun in the fifty years of its growth. 
This heat is also converted into an equiva- 
lent of steam, and this steam into an equiv- 
alent amount of mechanical motion. The 
sunshine, the pine tree, the heat, the steam, 
the mechanical motion, are only different 
forms of the same thing. Scientists of the 
materialistic school claim that this law 
holds good not only in the realm of the 
natural world, but in the mental and moral, 
as well. Prof. Thomas H. Huxley said, in 
a celebrated address in this country once, 



LOVE. 311 

that a speech was only so much transmuted 
mutton. According to Prof. Alexander 
Bain, there are five chief po^vers, or forces 
in nature : one mechanical or molar, the 
momentum of moving matter; the others, 
molecular, are embodied in the molecules, 
also supposed in motion — these are light, 
heat, chemical force, electricity. One mem- 
ber of vital energies, the nerve force, allied 
to electricity, fully deserves to rank in the 
correlation. According to this same dis- 
tinguished authority, mind is only a re- 
fined and sublimated form of physical 
force. In this view the great poems, 
paintings, and literature of the world 
would be only so much transmuted sun- 
shine — a higher form of the same force we 
see manifested in the flying railway train. 
In the one case the solidified sunshine con- 
tained in the coal is transmuted thi'ough 
the furnace of the engine into mechanical 
motion ; in the other, the heat contained in 



312 LOVE. 

food is transmuted througli the liiiman 
brain into literature and art. Perhaps it 
might not be at wide variance from the 
truth to assume that the force, mental or 
otherwise, expended by men who spend 
their lives under the dominion of the 
natural law of exclusiveness, may be ac- 
counted for in accordance with the doc- 
trine of the correlation of forces. Even 
mind, when earthly and low, is subject to 
the bearing of the law of sin and death, 
which is the scriptural name for the law of 
exclusiveness. 

III. 

It might be plausibly contended that 
the religious movement of the prophet Mo- 
hammed could be accounted for in accord- 
ance with the doctrine of the correlation of 
forces. It is to be remembered that the 
personality of Mohammed is no more the 
equivalent of the vast movement which has 



LOVE. 313 

existed and exists to-day under his name, 
than the acorn is the quantitative equiva- 
lent of the immense oak tree which has 
grown from it. The acorn, plus all the 
oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and 
other forces of sky and earth which it 
caught and organized, is the equivalent of 
the oak tree. The soil and the sky con- 
tain oaks in solution. Through acorns 
these are precipitated into trees. 

The mental, political, and social atmos- 
phere of Turkey contained the Mohamme- 
dan movement in solution before Moham- 
med was born. Through him it was pre- 
cipitated into Koran, mosque, prayer, and 
worship. 

Mohammed relied for success upon the 
methods with which men ordinarily sue- 
ceed. He appealed to men's love of fame, 
of pleasure, of conquest, of power, of 
riches. He simply organized the latent 
aspirations, and hopes, and fears of his 



314 LOVE. 

countrymen into a great kingdom, essenti- 
ally secular and sensual. 

In accordance witli the principle of the 
correlation of forces, it might be possible 
to account for the success of Buddha, Con- 
fucius, Caesar, and Bonaparte. What we 
wish now, is to apply this dcctrine, which 
the materialists claim is capable of measur- 
ing everything, from an atom to Milton's 
"Paradise Lost," to the life and work of 
Chi'ist. Granting, as we must, that all 
physical force may be estimated by it, and 
even that the work and thought of men, in 
so far as they live under the natural law of 
selfishness or exclusiveness, may be esti- 
mated by it. 

What we desire to inquire is, if the life 
and work of Christ form no exception to 
its operation, as ordinarily regarded. Can 
we, in accordance with this principle, ac- 
count for the life and influence of Christ 
on the assumption that he was only a man ? 



LOVE. 315 

Has no more force issued from the person 
of Christ than subsided when only a man 
named Jesus was crucified ? 

We have seen how the forms of physical 
force in the shape of fuel, food, moving 
waters, and winds may be traced directly 
to the sun. Let us also consider some of 
the forms of spiritual force which are 
traceable directly to the life of Christ, and 
inquire if they may be accounted for as 
the force which comes from the sun may 
be, by the principle of the convei-tibility 
of force. 

IV. 

There is the conserved spiritual force of 
Christian literature. This is stored up 
in the Bibles of the world, in commenta- 
ries upon its text, in expositions of its 
principles, in books illustrating its mean- 
ing. If all the Bibles of the world, books 
written about the Bible — in favor of it or 
against it — and all the books which have 



316 LOVE. 

been inspired by some truth or precept 
taught in the Bible, and all the books 
which owe their existence directly or in- 
directly to the Bible, were burned up, 
Christendom would be well-nigh without 
literature. All Bibles and all books and 
literature which have grown out of the 
Bible owe their existence directly to Christ. 
They have come as straight from him as 
the coal in the mountain has come from the 
sun. Much force has been expended in the 
writing of all these books and in printing 
them, binding them, circulating them. 
They represent millions of dollars, ages of 
painful, patient thought. Into them a mar- 
velous amount of force has lifted itself — 
physical force, money force, thought force. 
We are to find its equivalent. All the force 
that has arisen in Christian literature has 
subsided at some point, and the amount that 
subsided is the exact equivalent of that 
which has arisen. It must be remembered. 



LOVE. 317 

too, that distinctly Christian literature lias 
not made its way in the world, as have 
the writings of Homer and Plato, by their 
affinity with man's fancy. The wonderful 
interest which has ever centered around 
the Bible is totally different in kind and 
degree fi^om that which centers around the 
works of Shakspere. Whatever there is 
of literary merit, of philosophic thought, 
or of poetic depth in the Bible is inciden- 
tal. 

There is the conserved spiritual force of 
Christian art. The masterpieces in paint- 
ing, sculpture, music, poetr}^, and architec- 
ture are Christian. The inspiration which 
produced Milton's " Paradise Lost," Handel's 
'^ Messiah," Powers' " Eve," and St. Peter's 
at Rome, has all come from Christ. In 
the conception and production of these an 
immense amount of the most subtle, refined 
force has been expended. 

There is the conserved force of Christian 



318 LOVE. 

money. This has taken the form of 
church buildm2:s, buildino^s for education, 
for orphans, for the sick, for the wi'etched 
and the poor. There is not a great city 
in the world to-day without a Christian 
church edifice. They are the expressions 
of a great force, of Avhich we are seeking 
to find the equivalent. They owe their ex- 
istence directly to the person of Christ. 
The millions of money which have been 
spent in their erection have been because 
of love to him. They are as directly re- 
lated to him as the oak tree is to the sun. 
If all these churches were burned down to- 
day, men would begin at once the erection 
of better ones to take their places. The 
conserved force of Christian money, then, 
which tends to lift itself into church edi- 
fices, is not exhausted in those which 
already stand upon the earth; but just 
as much as has lifted itself into brick 
and marble, and window, and dome, and 



I 



LOVE. 319 

pinnacle is ready to take the same forms 
if tlie necessity for them were laid upon 
the Christian world. 

There is the conserved force of Chris- 
tian home life. The force here referred to 
is not manifest in the life itself, but in the 
form which family life has taken in the 
Christian world. There is hardly a home 
in Christendom to-day, but has been 
formed directly or indirectly with refer- 
ence to Christ. Into those places where 
character is formed, where revolutions are 
started, where Wesley s and Gladstones are 
developed, where eternal issues pend, 
Christ has come quietly and silently to 
regulate, to dominate and control. To 
thus influence, regulate, and vitally touch 
homes, to thus determine their form, 
appointment, and character, requires a 
great deal of force. 

There is the conserved force implied in 
the inception and perpetuation of the 



320 LOVE. 

Christian Calendar. Iniiclels, materialists, 
and atheists, in dating their letters, pay 
tribute to the character of Christ in the 
fact that they recognize he has ushered in 
a new era. Christ has claimed and held 
through nearly two thousand years one 
day out of every week to be devoted to 
his service. The day upon which he was 
born is celebrated in the hearts of men 
and in the arts of men. To change the 
world's calendar, to inaugurate and make 
permanent a ne^v" date, to impel the world 
to set apart a day for his Avorshij^, to 
furnish the world with neAv festivals and 
holidays, has required, certainly, a vast 
amoimt of force. This we are to trace 
and determine, and we are also to find its 
equivalent. 

There is the conserved Christian force 
implied m the fact that Christ has won the 
hearts of men. To Avin the disinterested 
love of one man takes much force, more 



I 



LOVE. 321 

than most men have. To win the love of 
a state takes more. But to win and to liold, 
through the pertui'bations and revolutions 
of kingdoms and republics, the undying 
love of the best and pui'est men on earth 
requires an infinite amount of force. This 
point in Christ's character greatly im- 
pressed the first ISTapoleon. Said he, "I 
know men. Christ is not a man. I have 
seen the time when I could inspire thou- 
sands to die for me, but it took the inspira- 
tion of my presence and the power of my 
word. Since I am away from men, a 
prisoner on Helena, no one will die for me. 
Christ, on the other hand, has been away 
from the world nearly two thousand years, 
and yet there are millions who would die 
for him. I tell you, Christ is not a man. 
I know men." 

V. 
It would be impossible to recount all the 
institutions, books, civilizations, laws, dis- 



322 LOVE. 

coveries, inventions, homes and hearts, into 
which the force of Christ's life has for the 
past nineteen hundred years been lifting it- 
self. As the sun expresses itself in the 
meadow, and lifts itself into the trees of the 
forests, so Christ has been embodying him- 
self in the institutions, homes, and thoughts 
of men. The scientists say all force can be 
accounted for. When force has risen up at 
one point it has subsided at another : the 
amount rising up being the exact equiva- 
lent of that subsiding. Upon this princi- 
ple we are seeking to account for all this 
force that, coming from Christ, has ex- 
pressed itself in tbe domestic, social, politi- 
cal, and ecclesiastical institutions of men. 
More has risen than can be computed by 
human arithmetic, or compassed by human 
imagination, or comprehended by human 
thought. Where did it come from ? Where 
did it subside ? At what point did it dis- 
appear to rise again in such overwhelming 



LOVE. 323 

volume, and such s\Yeeping and far-reacliing 
influence ? We go back througli eighteen 
hundred years. We are standing in Jeru- 
salem. We hear conflicting reports of a 
strange, daring young man. At length he 
is pointed out to us. There is nothing re- 
markable about his appearance. He is a 
Jew. He was born among the poor. He 
is not noted for culture. He has no social 
position. He has no money. He has no 
political power or prestige. He has no 
army at his command. He has no philo- 
sophical system. He is connected with no 
academy. He is only thirty-three years 
old. His words are contained in no books. 
They are simply in the memory of his dis- 
ciples. He is misunderstood. His own 
disciples do not know what to make of 
him. Finally he is arrested, and tried, and 
condemned, and crucified. He dies between 
two thieves, scorned, scoffed, buffeted, and 
friendless. Keep in mind the principle we 



324 LOVE. 

are considering. All force can be measured. 
No more force rises np tban subsides. 
Action and reaction are equal. We are 
seeking to account, in accordance witli tliis 
principle, for the vast amount of force 
Christ has poured into the institutions and 
thoughts of humanity. Is this young man's 
life, seemingly so insignificant and weak, 
the exact equivalent of all the churches, 
schools, colleges, arts, literature, homes, 
governments, sacrifice, heroism, good works, 
martyrdom, patience, love, and hope that 
have by general consent resulted from his 
existence in the world ? If so, was he only 
a man? Multiply thirty- three years by 
poverty, toil, contempt, sorrow, and cruci- 
fixion, and 3"ou have one product. Multi- 
ply nineteen hundred years by millions of 
churches, schools, and homes ; by millions 
of books, paintings, and poems ; by social 
position, wealth, and power; by success, 
triumph, and conquest ; by love, mercy, and 



r 



LOVE. - 325 

trutli ; by a hold upon humanity unequaled, 
and by an influence on home and .thought 
unrivaled, and you have another product. 
The question is : does one of these products 
seem to be the equivalent of the other? 
Does not the outcome surpass by an infinite 
degree the income? Is not the evolution 
out of all pi'oportion to the involution ? 
Has not a great deal more force risen up 
than seemingly subsided? Is there not 
much more power seemingly on this side 
the Cross than there was on the other ? 
Manifestly and clearly Christ's life and 
Avork cannot be accounted for by the prin- 
ciple of the correlation of forces. 

Mohammed's success and disciples we can 
understand. He succeeded by the ordi- 
nary methods by which men succeed. He 
appealed to men's love of fame, conquest, 
wealth, power, pleasure. He offered men, 
as a reward for their fealty to him, a great 
earthly kingdom, and such a heaven beyond 



326 



LOVE, 



the grave as would regale tlie senses, please 
the fancy, and gratify the appetites. He 
simply organized and applied the latent 
earthly forces already existing in his coun- 
trymen. His success is in line with that 
of Caesar and Bonaparte. The kingdom 
which he proposed to establish was merely 
an earthly, sensual kingdom. His methods 
were carnal, the motives to Avhich he ap- 
pealed were sensual, and the hopes which 
he inspired were carnal. Christ, on the 
other hand, condemned men's love of con- 
quest, power, fame, riches, and pleasure. 
He made the conditions of discipleship to 
consist in the denial of self and in the re- 
linquishment of all earthly hopes, gratifica- 
tions, and prospects. " If you find your 
life in my kingdom," said he, " you must 
lose it in this." He proposed to build up 
a kingdom as wide as the world, and as 
lasting as eternity, without adopting a sin- 
gle method or utilizing any of the means 



I 



LOVE, 327 

ordinarily relied on for success. Not only 
did lie propose a new kingdom, but to pop- 
ulate it with new men, motives, hopes, 
conceptions, and opinions. Hence, to come 
into his kingdom, men were to be made 
over. They were to die to self, to the 
world, to pleasure. So Christ's work and 
influence in the world not only forms an 
exception to the principle of the correlation 
of forces, but here we have an unparalleled 
amount of force rising up when, to all hu- 
man appearances, none subsided at all. 

VI. 

A poor young carpenter dies. He goes 
down in ignominy. Amid the jeers and 
contempt of the multitude, he goes down 
into the grave. But from that moment, 
commotion begins. Forgiveness of sin in 
the name of Christ is preached ; disciples 
are won ; books are written ; civilizations 
are touched ; movements are inaugurated ; 



328 LOVE. 

persecutions, bloody and relentless, are 
waged. The fires of hate are kindled ; 
storms from all round the social, political, 
and religious sky gather, and howl, and 
empty their fury upon the new movement. 
Nothing impedes it ; fire cannot hinder it ; 
persecution intensifies it ; death does not 
alarm it. Now, we submit, does not such a 
movement, starting from such a source, and 
moving out with such vigor, and becoming 
intenser and deeper as it is extended, form 
a remarkable and singular exception to the 
principle we are considering ? Is there any 
rule among men by which it may be esti- 
mated and classified and labeled ? Can 
any human, or logical, or philosophical 
formula or principle measure the multi- 
form and widely diversified facts in this 
case? Does it not form an exception to 
all rules and human methods of measure- 
ments ? Do we not augment the difficul- 
ties of accounting; for the work of Christ 



\ 



LOVE. 329 

by minifying him, and calling Mm a mere 
man ? Is not the easier way to account for 
Christ's work, to accord to him all that he 
claims for himself and all that his disci- 
ples claimed for him. He said, "All 
power is given to me in heaven and in 
earth." If we accept this as true, we can 
account for his work. But in this view, 
we will see that his life was divine and 
one with the Father of us all. Then we 
will see that he was the Son of God, the 
Word made flesh, the incarnation of the 
divine mind and wisdom and power. It 
is impossible to account for the life and 
work of Christ by the principles with 
which physical force and merely humaai 
force and thought are measured. The sun 
is the center of the system of nature, a sys- 
tem destined to end. Any system, the 
center of which is gradually losing its 
force, cannot last. Christ is the center of a 
spiritual system totally different from the 



330 LOVE. 

system of nature. By all tlie force the sun 
parts with to the worlds about it, by so 
much less has it. It is gradually losing it- 
self, to find itself no more forever. Christ 
is pouring his force into the system of 
which he is the center, but by such a pro- 
cess he is not losing his force, but increas- 
ing it. By losing himself he finds himself. 
The universal law of the system of which 
he is the center, is the law of communion. 
The force he gives away comes back to 
him augmented by the personality of all 
who partake of it. Instead of becoming 
poorer by giving, he becomes richer. This 
great truth St. Paul saw w^hen he said : '^ All 
things are yours, whether Paul, or Apollos, 
or Cephas, or the w^orld, or life, or death, 
or things present, or things to come, all are 
yours, and ye are Christ's ; and Christ is 
God's." 



LOVE. 331 



VII. 



One life lias appeared among men, tlien, 
that was all love. Jesus Christ is the only 
original, absolutely unselfish life that has 
been lived on earth. The saints have 
found the secret, and strength, and inspira- 
tion of their unselfishness and love in 
him. The love which matches and meets 
the illimitable nature of the human spirit 
is embodied in a life that cannot be meas- 
ured by the ordinary rules and standards of 
men. The object of which hunger is the 
subject, is bread; the object of which in- 
tellect is the subject, is truth ; the object 
of which will is the subject, is law ; the 
object of which the aesthetic sense is the 
subject, is beauty ; the object of which 
the spiritual nature is the subject, is 
Jesus Christ. The spirit of man which 
has for its correlate in time, the race, has 
for its correlate in eternity, the life of one 



332 LOVE. 

in wMcli is summed up all power, all truth, 
all law, all beauty, and all love. As the 
embodiment of love tlie human spirit finds 
in Christ the climate and the conditions 
exactly adapted to its own realization. 
The plan and pattern, the invisible frame- 
work and ideal of every man's life is 
Christian. To be an oak is to be a per- 
fect acorn, to be an apj)le is to be a com- 
plete flower, to be a Christian is be a 
complete man. 



IMMORTALITY. 



*' How does the rivulet find its way ? 
How does the floweret know its day 
And open its cup to catch the ray ? 

*' I see the germ to the sunlight reach, 
And the nestling knows the old bird's speech. 
I do not know who is there to teach. 

" I see the hare through the thicket glide, 
And the stars through the trackless spaces ride. 
I do not see who is there to guide. 

*' He is eyes for all, who is eyes for the mole. 
See motion goes to the rightful goal. 
O God ! I can trust for the human soul." 



i 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE PERMANENCE OF THE COMPLETED LIFE 
OF MAN. 

Back of the movement wbich began in 
creation and culminated in man, we posited 
the mind of a self-conscious, self -determin- 
ing, self -active, personal God. Necessity 
was upon us to assume a first principle of 
some kind, and it seemed proper to have 
one large enough to account for the facts 
we were about to consider. The first prin- 
ciple Thales set up was water. In water 
he saw the origin of all and the end of 
all. But all that came out of water must, 
in the end, find its death in water. With 
nothing but a vast ocean to start with, we 
shall find, at the conclusion, nothing more 
articulate and rational than an infinite ex- 
panse of water to end with. 

335 



IMMORTALITY. 



Herbert Spencer, "tlie heir of all tlie 
ages in tlie foremost files of time," took as 
tlie starting point of his philosophy the un- 
knowable. In the selection of a first prin- 
ciple, however, we think Thales, though 
the first philosopher who ever lived, had 
the advantage of him. 

Water is a definite and positive some- 
what; the unknowable is an indefinite and 
inarticulate vacuity. With water for a first 
principle, the prospect is certain destruc- 
tion in a general deluge. With the un- 
knowable for a first principle, the prospect 
is sure imbecility in universal ignorance. 
It is better to be drowned in water than to 
have the light of intelligence put out in 
everlasting night. Mr. Spencer's unknow- 
able was a convenient receptacle into which 
to dump difficulties and troublesome prob- 
lems ; but, as a working hypothesis, it was 
not sufficient even to build the universe 
Mr. Spencer saw. In the process of con- 



nniORTALITT. B3V 



structing his system, Mr. Spencer gave to 
liis unknowable nearly all the attributes 
which theologians give to a personal Grod. 
As we have already seen, when Mr. Spen- 
cer got through with drawing from his un- 
knowable all that he had to have to give 
his system the order and show of reason, it 
was found that the unknowable part of the 
unknowable had about been scattered in 
the light of knowledge. For this same un- 
knowable was found to have Being, Power, 
Activity, Causal Energy, and Omnipresence 
for attributes. Nothing more can come 
out of a first principle than what is con- 
tained in it. Out of water, nothing but 
water comes, and out of the unknowable, 
nothing but the unknowable comes. One 
can posit an acorn, under certain conditions 
of soil and sky, and get an oak; but the 
germ of the oak must be in the acorn, and 
the nutriment of the oak must be in the 
conditions before any oak can come out. 



338 IMMORTALITY. 

It is the old truism, tliat " out of nothing, 
nothing comes." No one ever attempts to 
account for anything without a first prin- 
ciple. The test of the reality and value of 
a first principle will be determined solely 
by its capacity to account for the facts 
which come out of it. It is because the 
unknowable fails to account for the facts 
of nature, and for self-consciousness, self- 
determination, and self -activity in man, who 
stands as the complete consummation and 
realization of nature, that it is not accepted 
as an adequate first principle. 

Matthew Arnold, in order to escape the 
objections which he had to taking a self- 
conscious, self-determining, personal God 
for a first principle, substituted "The 
Stream of Tendency, not ourselves, that 
makes for righteousness." But this sen- 
tence, when analyzed, reveals the fact that 
Matthew Arnold's Stream has about the 
same essential elements the theologian sup- 



IMMORTALITY. 339 



poses to reside in God. A stream has a 
source, a direction, and an end. Here, then, 
we liav^e cause, means, and ultimate object. 
It is also said that the stream makes for 
something ; here is self-determination. It 
is said to make for righteousness ; here is 
the attribute of Justice, and justice can 
only be predicated of a person. 

Given nature, with its elements, laws, 
and unity, and man as the being in whom 
the whole of nature is summed up, with 
self-consciousness, self-determination, and 
self-activity ; the only first principle suffi- 
cient to account for the facts is a self-con- 
scious, self-determining, self-active personal 
God. It is only such a first principle that 
is large enough to account for the number, 
and order, and drift, and collocations of 
the facts ; and to such a first principle the 
number, and order, and drift, and colloca- 
tions of the facts may be traced. 

If we see red and violet and blue colors 



340 IMMORTALITT. 



appearing in tlie carpet on one side of the 
loom, we are warranted in assuming that 
red and violet and blue threads are enter- 
ing the carpet on the other side of the 
loom. Nature is a marvelous loom. At 
first there are simple elements, then 
there are compounds, then there are 
plants, then there are animals. At last all 
the elements, as so many strands, vdi\\ 
their manifold hues and variegated colors, 
appear in the life of man. Man is the 
harbor where all the freight, started on its 
stormy course at creation, comes to shore. 
Its matter takes majestic form in his body, 
its power lends itself as wind to his sail, 
as heat to his engine, as light to his street : 
its truth is arranged by the intellect into 
literature and science : its law is formu- 
lated into statutes, enactments, and consti- 
tutions : its beauty is built into oratorios 
and spread in radiant visions: its love is 
accepted and turned into tenderness, and 



IMMORTALITT. 341 

sacrifice, and hope. Infinite personality at 
tlie beginning, self-conscious, self-deter- 
mining, and self-active. Finite personality 
at the conclusion, self-conscious, self-de- 
termining, and self-active. 

If you call the process evolution, then 
no more has been evolved than was in- 
volved. If you prefer direct creation, 
then nothing is seen in the creature that 
was not built into him by the Creator. 
Either way, if a self-conscious, self-deter- 
mining, and self-active man appears on 
one side of nature, a self-conscious, self- 
determining, and self-active personal God 
is, we may know, on the other. 



The importance of a correct first prin- 
ciple, and of a right idea of the nature of 
that first principle, cannot be urged too 
strongly. In the right solution of the 
(question we are considering, everything 



342 IMMORTALITY. 



depends on it. If we start with water, as 
Thales did, we will be forced to conclude 
that individual lives, like bubbles, will 
eventually fall back and mingle with the 
waves of the sea. 

If we start with the unknowable, as 
Spencer did, we shall be led to see that 
human spirits will lose themselves at 
death, as candles lose their light when the 
wicks are consumed. 

It is not left us, however, arbitrarily to 
assume such a first principle as comports 
with the particular theory of life it is our 
purpose to establish. The first principle 
that corresponds to reality is already 
implicit in the facts, the origin, and 
pui'pose, and end of Avhich we wish to 
know. The law of gravity is implicit in 
falling bodies, and in the revolving stars. 
The sunbeam is implicit in the growing 
tree. All that happens Avhen one posits a 
first principle that is not implicit in the 



IMMORTALITY. 343 



facts he is considering, is that his first 
princijDle will fail to account for the facts. 
Matthew Arnold had a perfect right to 
assume as a first principle, '' The Stream 
of Tendency, not ourselves, that makes for 
righteousness." This looked poetic and 
impersonal, and in his esteem served him 
as a Avorking hypothesis. 

It never seemed to occur to him that 
his principle implied the same elements 
and attributes the theologians regarded as 
uniting in God ; the elements and attri- 
butes he was so anxious to get rid of. 
Herbert Spencei', with a theory to work 
out, and a particular system to buttress 
and bolster, devised and adopted a first 
principle that seemed to promise most to 
his peculiar views. This he had a right to 
do. But he had no right to take as a first 
principle the unknowable, with which to 
destroy the Christian's Grod; and just as 
soon as he had accomplished this to his 



344 IMMORTALITY. 



entire satisfaction, to turn deliberately and 
take nearly every attribute of the Chris- 
tian's God to bestow upon his unknow- 
able. It is hardly to be supposed that 
Mr. Spencer, with malice aforethought 
planned the death of God in order to 
steal his attributes. The more charitable 
view is to suppose that at the outset his 
intention was to erect an absolutely new 
philosophic edifice, upon a new and origi- 
nal foundation. To do this, it was 
necessary to clear the ground of everything 
in sight. So in a high moment of jDhiloso- 
phic self-confidence, he determined on the 
obliteration of all previous and time- 
honored first principles, that he might 
posit one of his own making and to his 
own liking. 

This was the destructive stage of his 
mental movement, and it did not occur to 
him that many of the elements he was 
clearing away in such wholesale fashion 



IMMORTALITY. 345 

would be necessary to cany up his new 
philosopliic temple. When lie got through 
with the period of preparation, he had 
nothing to start with but a plain, simple, 
empty, unkno^^^able. But it soon became 
evident that the unknowable must have 
some content, in order to support a decent 
and orderly structure. At this point he 
took the attributes of the Christian's God, 
Being, Power, Activity, Causal Energy, 
Omnipresence, and filled up his empty 
unknowable with them. Then he pro- 
ceeded with his work. 

11. 

In starting with a self-conscious, self- 
determining and personal God, then, as 
a first principle that accommodates and 
insures the immortality of the individual 
spirit, we are only beginning with what is 
implicit in the facts of nature and human 
life. Let it be clearly apprehended that 



346 IMMORTALITY. 



the ground of the self-conscious, self-deter- 
mining, personal God is thought. That the 
fundamental and first thing in this uni- 
verse is mind. That the being of God is 
secondary to the mind, or thought of God. 
God has being, because he has thought, 
and not thought, because he has being. 
The trouble with the pantheistic system of 
Spinoza was that he looked upon God, 
first as infinite substance or being, while 
thought was only one of the modes of 
this being, and extension was the other. 
The root of all doubt and skepticism is to 
be traced to a confused notion of the 
nature of God. Many speak of God as 
the Supreme Being, and advertise by their 
language that in their esteem God is dif- 
fused nebulosity, or universally extended 
externality. There never was a skeptic in 
the w^orld who had come to the rational 
and tenable position, that God is primarily, 
and fundamentally, and essentially thought. 



IMMORTALITY. 347 



We may properly speak of his being, his 
wisdom, his justice, his truth, his love ; 
but these are different determinations of 
his thought. God's being is the exter- 
nality of his thought. His wisdom is his 
thought devising means to ends. His 
justice is his thought balancing and regu- 
lating. His truth is his thought in 
realization. His love is his thought in 
sacrifice. " In the beginning was the 
Word." A word is an expressed thought. 
"The Word was Avith God." The real- 
ized thought or w^ord was with God, the 
Eternal Thinker, or Thought. " God said, 
Let there be light, and there was light." 
Light was thus the expression of thought. 
Nearly all materialism and pantheism look 
upon things as an emanation from some- 
thing. Vapor emanates fi'om the surface 
of a river, and is only the river in diffu- 
sion. But the universe does not emanate 
from God ; it is the direct creation and 



348 IMMORTALITY. 



expression of his thought. Potentially the 
universe was always in the thought of 
God. 

III. 

We have dwelt at length on the self-con- 
sciousness and self-determination of God, 
as these unite in him as an absolute person- 
ality, for the reason that the immortality of 
the human spirit finds its condition and its 
security here. If God is a person, and 
self-conscious, self -determining, and self- 
active, man is immortal, for in him the 
elements which constitute the essential 
nature of God appear. Man is a person 
and a spirit, made in the likeness and 
image of God. He is, therefore, as imper- 
ishable and indestructible as God is. He 
has thought and is therefore self-conscious ; 
he has a wdll, and is therefore self -deter- 
mining; he has power, and is therefore 
self-active ; he maintains his identity 
through change, and is therefore a person. 



IMMORTALITY. 349 



But the finite person finds Lis life througli 
the infinite Person. He finds his knowl- 
edge by partaking of truth, the realized 
thought of God ; he finds his freedom by 
the observance of law, the expressed will 
of God ; he finds his peace by partaking 
of the life that was in Christ, the mani- 
fested love of God. As the fundamental 
and prior thing in the being of God is 
thought, so the fundamental and prior 
thing in the being of man is thought. 
His progress in the practical matters of 
life will be in proportion to his thought. 
His political status will be in proportion 
to his thought ; his religious attainment 
will be in proportion to his thought. 
Schleiermacher said "Feeling is the 
source of religion — a feeling of depend- 
ence." But one cannot have a feeling of 
dependence without having the thought of 
dependence. One cannot feel that he de- 
pends unless he thinks of himself as de- 



350 IMMORTALITY. 



pendent. Matthew Arnold said that reli- 
gion was morality touched by emotion. 
But there cannot be morality without the 
thought of some rule by Avhich conduct 
ought to be guided. Even the African 
savage, who worships a snake, thinks there 
is something in the snake entitled to 
his adoration. Thought is the clearest 
self-explication of the human spirit. In 
thought it comes to itself and knows itself. 
Take thought out of the spirit of man, 
and you take out its essential nature. Its 
immortality, even were it possible, would 
then not be worth contending for. One 
had as well be ])lotted out, as to lose the 
only element of his spirit by which he is 
able to recognize himself as such. Look- 
ing upon thought as the center and kernel 
of the human spiiit, we see that to deny 
the immortality of the human spirit is to 
assume that thought is destructible; and 
this is a flat contradiction, for destruction 



IMMORTALITY. ^51 

has no meaning, except in relation to 
thought. It is of the very nature of 
thought to be eternal. No thought ever 
dies, or can die. All the determinations of 
God's thought are eternal. The mind of 
Grod has within it all determinations of 
thought; those past, those present, and 
those to come. Some of these determina- 
tions of the divine thought have taken the 
form of objects in the inorganic world, 
some have taken the form of objects in the 
vegetable kingdom, and some have taken 
the form of objects in the animal kingdom. 
The determinations of thought, of which 
inorganic things, trees, and animals were 
the expressions, are all eternal. 

It is of the nature of the things in 
which the determinations of thought took 
form to change and pass away. But the; 
ideal patterns, of which they were only the 
temporary forms, are held in the mind of 
God forever. The house which expresses 



352 IMMORTALITY. 

the arcMtect's ideal may be blown away, or 
burned up, but the ideal in the thought 
of the architect cannot be blown away or 
burned up. Now in man the determina- 
tion of God's thought is not expressed in a 
thing, but in a thought. Man, as God's 
child, inherits, or comes through creation 
into the possession of thought, of mind, so 
that he is able to set up thinking — in his 
own behalf, and by the self -determining, self- 
conscious, and self -active power of his own 
mind. God as thought is his own object 
and his own subject, and man as thought 
is his own object and his own subject. 
God has set him up to housekeeping in the 
republic of thought. 

In the changes which take place in ma- 
terial objects, there is preservation of the 
species, but the loss of the iudividual. 
The object is an element and not a self. 
When it changes, it is by something ex- 
ternal to itself, and in changing, realizes its 



IMMORTALITY. 353 



nature. It is indifferent to change, as 
there is no central self that retains its 
essential identity in the midst of all change. 
The tree belongs to a higher order of ex- 
istence than a rock. It is the expression 
of unconscious life. The animal belongs 
to a still higher plane than the tree. Besides 
appropriating food from its environment, as 
does the tree, it takes in the images of 
things, and lives a low order of sentient 
life. But in order that animals may take 
in the images of things through the senses, 
the things must be present before them. 
When the thing is gone, the image fades. 
The objects which stand around man in his 
environment pass into his consciousness 
through the senses. But when the envi- 
ronment changes and the objects are taken 
away, the impressions made by the objects 
remain. In this way man re-creates the 
universe for his own thought. The gurg- 
ling of brooks, the murmur of the sea, the 



354 IMMORTALITY. 



sigliing of the winds, the cooing of doves, 
he hears just as the animal does. But 
away from brooks, and seas, and winds, and 
doves, Beethoven throws into one of his 
symphonies all the notes that were ever on 
sea or land. He has within him the same 
kind of mind that expressed itself in all 
the notes of music, and he not only hears 
these notes, but he re-combines and re- 
organizes them in his great compositions. 

IV. 

The spirit of man is simple. It is an 
ultimate and indivisible unity. Death 
divides, breaks up, and disintegrates. The 
nature of the human spirit is such, how- 
ever, that it cannot be divided, broken up, 
or disintegrated. We see it maintain its 
identity through the storms and mutations 
of eighty }^ears. All things change about 
it. , The very body that constitutes its 
temporary abiding place is torn down and 



IMMORTALITY. 355 

rebuilt many times in tlie course of a long 
life. It advances in knowledge and ex- 
perience ; grows larger and richer in hope 
and love, but all its accumulations of 
thought and increasing wealth of life are 
stored in the same self-conscious, self-de- 
termining, personal spirit. In the evening 
of life the old man sits in the midst of his 
grandchildren and recounts the scenes of 
his boyhood days. All the waves of time 
contained within the sweep of three score 
years and ten have left their labels of drift 
and storm on the shores of his life. But 
they have not worn, or wasted, or altered 
his spirit. 

A rock wears away, or is crumbled to 
dust, when it is a rock no longer. A tree 
is cut down and split into cord wood and 
burned in the engine, and it is a tree no 
longer. In the furnace it is turned back 
into its original elements. In the fire it is 
altered or othered. The other of a tree is 



356 IMMOnTALITT. 



oxygen, hydrogen, etc. The bird in the 
thicket is shot by the heartless sportsman. 
It falls to the ground and its little heart 
ceases to beat. Soon its body is changed 
back into earth and air. The other of a 
bird is not a bird, but the particles which 
were organized under the process of natural 
law to form its body. The images which 
fell on its vision in the grove, faded away 
when the objects which caused them were 
removed. The sounds Avhich came to its 
ears from here and there in the forest 
passed from its sense when the air that 
caused them ceased to vibrate. In the 
bird there was no inner self, abiding, self- 
conscious, determining, and active, that 
was capable of grasping and holding and 
recreating the \asions and the notes which 
came to it. It may have had a sort of sen- 
tient consciousness, but it was not much 
above the consciousness of the sea, which 
holds the images of the stars in its dark 



IMMORTALITY. 357 



blue waves, as long as they stand above 
it. 

By comparing man with the classes of 
individuals below him, we may see the 
respects in which he rises infinitely above 
them. And we may see, too, by this com- 
parison, that immortality is not something 
to which man is to come beyond death, but 
something that he has already in the very 
constitution of the personal spirit. The 
same may be said of man's body, that is 
said of the bodies of trees and birds, its 
other is the original elements which compose 
it. The life in a tree cannot other itself, be- 
cause it is not conscious. The life in a bird 
cannot other itself because its consciousness 
is not self -consciousness. But in man's body 
there resides a spirit that can other itself. 
Man, as a personal spirit, can project himself 
out of himself, and reason with himself and 
commune with himself. The self he pro- 
jects out of himself is another self, but not 



358 IMMORTALITY. 



a different self. The other of man's spirit, 
then, is not something else, but it is the 
same spirit. Man is subject and object, 
active and passive, determiner and deter- 
mined. Man, as subject, may externalize 
himself, and thus make of himself his own 
object, and by this self -separation enrich 
himself and advance within himself. 
Beethoven, as a thinking subject, objecti- 
fied his thought in the symphonies, and 
thus regaled and thrilled his own spirit. 
By putting his own thought into the form 
of sound waves, it came back to him in the 
rain, and storm, and thunder, and sigh, and 
murmur of music. As a thinking subject 
Raphael objectified his own thought in the 
transfiguration, and thus had it come back 
to him in a vision as immortal as the sj^irit 
that created it. Michael Angelo objectified 
his own thought in the Last Judgment, 
and by this self-separation of his spirit, 
advertised its indestructibility. Homer, as 



IMMORTALITY. 359 

a thinking subject, objectified his thought 
into the Iliad. This great epic poem has 
already lived, even on this side of the 
grave, where the order is change and decay, 
nearly three thousand years. Are we to 
conclude that a personal spirit that could 
deposit itself in numbers never to die, was 
itself subject to dissolution? This would 
be to have an effect greater than the cause. 
The sunbeam may deposit itself in a tree, 
and thus secure to itself life in embodied 
form for hundreds of years. But in order 
that this may be, the sun must send his 
beams to warm and nourish the tree all 
the days of its life. The Iliad has lived, 
however, nearly three thousand years, 
without the daily ministrations of Homer's 
spirit. For a bubble on the sea of life to 
lift itself into imperishable form and then 
fall back to mingle with the waves and the 
waters, is to contradict the principle of the 
correlation of forces^ w^hich declares that 



360 IMMORTALITY. 



action and reaction must always be equal. 
The expression a spirit makes of itself can- 
not be more enduring than the spirit itself. 

" The ship may sink and I may drink 
A hasty death in the bitter sea ; 
But all that I leave in the ocean grave 

May be slipped and spared, and no loss to me. 

" What care I, though falls the skj^, 

And the shriveled earth to a cinder turn? 
No fires of doom can ever consume 

What never was made noi* meant to burn. 

" Let go the breath ! There is no death 
For the living soul, nor loss nor harm. 
Nor of the clod is the life of God ; 

Let it mount, as it will, from form to form." 

When a train of cars stops suddenly at 
the depot, the energy that caused it to fly 
along the track is not lost, it is only trans- 
formed. When a tree is cut down, the 
energy that expressed itself in its trunk 
and branches is not lost, it will only take 
other foiTns. When a horse dies, the en- 
ergy of which its life was the expression 



IMMORTALITY. 361 

is not lost, it is transformed. When a 
tree or a liorse passes from tlie living world 
into the world of inorganic things^ the 
exact amount of energy in the body of the 
living tree or horse takes other forms. 
The amount on the side of death is equal 
to the amount on the side of life. If we 
consider man only as a physical organism, 
the same may be said of him. The amount 
transformed into earth and air, will be the 
equivalent of the organized fund of bone, 
and sineAv, and muscle, turned over to 
death. If we thus estimate man, however, 
as we do a tree or a horse, have we taken 
into account the entire sum of assets that 
were in his possession during life ? What 
of his thought, affection, and volition ? 
When Kepler died, what became of the 
intelligence that discovered the " Three 
Laws," which constitute the arches of the 
sublime bridge that spans the vast chasm 
between Ptolemaic and modern astronomy ? 



362 IMMORTALITY. 



When Laplace died, wliat became of the 
spirit that solved the problems of the Me- 
canique Celeste, by the aid of which the 
irregularities of the heavenly bodies were 
reduced to order? When Adams died, 
what became of the massive spirit that 
built in the depths of his own study the 
planet Neptune, with no other raw material 
to work from than the perturbations of 
Uranus ? When Moses died, what became 
of the affection that expressed itself in the 
training and civilization of a race ? When 
Jesus Christ died, what became of the love 
that sacrificed itself for a sinful world ? 

When we begin to talk about human life, 
we find all that has made civilization is not 
physical. In the death of human beings, 
the energies of thought, and affection, and 
volition are not represented in the transfor- 
mations which take place with reference to 
theu^ bodies. Yet all the energies man has 
put forth that give any evidence of his 



IMMORTALITY. 363 

record on the earth are such as come from 
thought, and affection, and volition. As 
these energies are not transformed at death, 
as are the forces of the body, they must 
continue. For to suppose they ceased at 
death would be to break the law of the 
correlation and the conservation of forces. 
If they are not transformed at death, along 
with the forces of the body, they nmst re- 
side in another than the material world, 
and must not, therefore, be subject to its 
changes. 

V. 
The personal spirit, by its very nature, 
and tendencies, and possibilities, seems to be 
addressed to another than the tangible, 
local, and physical realm in which it finds 
itself while residing in the body. An irre- 
pressible and wide-reaching something in 
the spirit of each man seems to impel him 
to triumph over space, and time, and change. 
In the accumulation of property, he would 



364 IMMORTALITY. 



own the whole world. A very small por- 
tion of land would be adequate to his 
physical needs. But he would add acre 
to acre, till his private domain compassed 
the surface of the whole earth. Alexan- 
der, w^eeping because there was not an- 
other world he could get to conquer, ad- 
vertises the immensity and illimitability 
of the human spirit. By the aid of instru- 
ments by which man has augmented and 
lengthened his power of vision, he has 
come upon stars rolling in the immensity 
of space to the circle of the thirteenth 
mao-nitude. He has not been content to 

o 

look upon the stars in the vast depths of 
space, but he has photographed them, so 
as to behold their faces in his study. Back 
beyond the dim dawn of time, commensu- 
rate with the appearance of human life on 
earth, he has gone, to return with the chemi- 
cal, physical, and stratigraphical history of 
the globe. By the aid of steam, he has 



IMMORTALITY. 365 

made liiniself a cosmopolite, and througli 
the application of electricity, he lias made 
himself ubiquitous. Must we not posit a 
spirit correlated to the universal to account 
for this disposition to compass all things, 
to know all things, and to be everywhere ? 
The tendency of the human spirit to com- 
pass and possess universality is seen, too, 
by its capacity to create language, in which 
it embodies all things and through which 
it expresses its thought of all things. If 
there had to be separate words for all in- 
dividual things any but the most limited 
knowledge would be impossible, and such 
knowledge alone there would be if man 
was shut u]3 to atomic sensations for the 
data of knowledge. But the mind, by 
its creative, combining power, and its 
active spontaneous insight, forms words 
which represent not only individual things, 
but classes and species of things. Man de- 
vises the word oah^ and lets it stand for all 



366 IMMORTALITY. 



the oaks in tlie world. He creates tlie 
word humanity, and puts into it tlie whole 
human race. He coins the word vegetable, 
and uses it to define the whole kingdom of 
plants. Thus he not only goes over the 
world and sees it directly, but he produces 
language manifold and complicated, and 
elastic enough to accommodate and contain 
the world, with all that is in it. This 
makes it possible for him to go round the 
world and see all its wonders, without 
leaving the place of his birth. 

He not only Ijuilds for himself the uni- 
verse in language, so that he can contem- 
plate its moons, and measure its suns, and 
sail its oceans, and climb its mountains in 
the silent precincts of his study, but he 
avails himself of sound and light, also, to 
give expression to universal ideas. He 
takes a few notes, and so combines and 
mixes them as to be able to touch all the 
chords of the universal human heart in one 



IMMORTALITY. 367 

song. Micliael Angelo put all tbe theology 
of all the books into the Last Judgment. 

Throughout the length and breadth of 
nature, there is economy of faculty and re- 
source until we come to man. The iish 
has not a gill nor a fin too many, and there 
is not in the water where he lives any sur- 
plus or margin upon Avhich he does not 
make levies for his life. 

The wings and tail and bones of the bird 
are all necessary to his poise and circle in 
the sky. The same economy is found in 
the atmosphere through which the bird 
flies. It is none too heavy and none too 
light. But when we come to man, we find 
that margin and surplus is the rule. He 
has a surplus of faculty and a surplus of re- 
source, a surplus of endowment and a sur- 
plus of environment. He finds it necessary 
to make levies on hardly any of himself to 
get along in this world, at least as far as 
his natural wants are concerned. What 



368 IMMORTALITT. 



would be the use for a carpenter to have 
all the tools necessary to build St. Peter's 
at Rome, if his only work was to put up a 
tent for a week's camping excursion in the 
woods ? Why have an engine mth a mil- 
lion horse power to run a flutter mill ? 

With the animal there is changing en- 
do^vment and changing environment. 
Limitations are clear and distinct within 
and without. But with man there is in- 
finite environment. Within he has a self- 
determining s^^irit, subject and object, 
bound together in a simple and indissolu- 
ble unity. Surrounding this spirit, infinite 
in structure and capacity, is infinite truth, 
infinite law, and infinite love. Even Her- 
bert Spencer said '^ Perfect corresjDondence 
would be perfect life. Were there no 
changes in the envii'onment but such as 
the organism had adapted changes to meet, 
and were it never to fail in the efficiency 
with which it met them, there would be 



IMMORTALITY. 369 

eternal existence, and eternal knowledge." 
In the personal spirit and the elements 
which surronnd it, we have the two eter- 
nal terms of eternal correspondence. A 
self-determining spirit is essentially, struc- 
tnrally, and constitutionally imperishable. 
It others itself only through its own act. 
And the other of itself is itself. It is its 
own subject and its own object. When 
it goes out of itself, it is itself that goes 
out. It is a complete circle, an ab- 
solute and indestructible individuation. 
It is the final expression of God's creative 
power. Through all the revolutions and 
mutations of time, this was the destined 
goal. The destruction of a human spirit 
would register the death of God. It is 
the direct expression of the spirit of God, 
and bears his own likeness and image, and 
has for the guarantee of its permanence 
the person of the eternal God himself. 



370 IMMORTALITY. 



VI. 

Rev. Edward White of England, Dr. E. 
Petavel of France, and Dr. Lyman Abbott 
of America, have denied what Dr. Abbott 
is pleased to call facultative immortality. 
Immortality, in their esteem, is an impor- 
tation from without. It is the claim of 
Locke, and Hume, and Mill, and Spencer, 
that knowledge is an importation from the 
realm of sensation. Their war was upon 
the knowing faculties. From the domain 
of philosophy the conflict has passed up to 
the plane of religion, and we now have 
the attack made upon the self -determining 
spirit. In the sensational philosophy, we 
have seen all things dissolved. It not 
only makes it impossible to rationally be- 
lieve in God, but also in mind, and self, and 
external world. The sensational philoso- 
phy got the object of knowledge by a proc- 
ess that destroyed the subject of knowl- 



IMMORTALITY. 371 

edge, so this irrational theory of Dr. Ly- 
man Abbot would secure the object of 
life by the destruction of the subject of 
life. We know that the raw material 
of knowledge is found in the objective 
world, but unless the mind has the in- 
herent combining, active power to take this 
raw material and organize it into an orderly 
system, then the individual can never 
know anything. There being in the mind 
no master of ceremonies, no director and 
referee, the tramp and vagabond sensations 
may wander in and wander out at their 
sweet will. They would come in with their 
own opinions and go out with their own 
opinions. There being no head of the 
house within, the tramps could have it all 
their own way. 

Knowledge, beginning out of the mind, 
would have its cause and end out of the 
mind. Beginning with matter, knowl- 
edge could be resolved back into matter. 



372 IMMOnTALITT. 



We believe tlie life in whicli the human 
spirit is to realize its nature fully and har- 
moniously was embodied in Jesus Christ, 
who was the word made flesh. 

But it is because the spirit of man is 
essentially indestructible, that it has power 
to take hold of this life and assimilate it. 
If it refuses this divine embodiment of life, 
it brings disorder, and confusion, and ever- 
lasting sorrow to itself, but not destruction. 
The self-determining sj^irit is in its struc- 
ture and constitution up to the style of 
life offered it in the Son of Man and the 
Son of God. In finding the life that was 
in Christ, it finds its own life, and enters 
the path of everlasting progress. 



THE END. 






life 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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